The Rails (Los rieles)

The Rails (Los rieles)

Novel
Tusquets Editores, 2022
192 pages

A series of short stories, in which the author of Cousins displays her family vitriolic vignettes, her gallery of outcasts, and her unrivalled literary mastery.

“Variations on Mr. Le Diable”, is the title of one of the chapters of this poignant book, in which Aurora Venturini stops firmly in the narrow limit between dreams and wakefulness, between madness and sanity, or better, between life and death, to relate those vast instants of her astonishing experience in which she felt that the time to leave this world had come. However, fighting with the words as her main weapon, here she is, ninety years old, proving why her writing (what is the same to her life) can fight Mr. Le Diable and win the match.

One of her best books. Mariana Enríquez, Radar Libros, Página 12

A prose with a highly expressive strength (…). A bristly syntaxis. (…). A poetry of the disproportion and a biting humour as a vanishing point (…), all this performs an aesthetical phenomenon of unique characteristics in Spanish. Jorge Consiglio, La Nación

The labels are too small; they are incomplete. What is the same as saying they are unnecessary. The Rails can be read as a novel, memoirs, a treatise on self-help for hospitalization times. (…) Anything that is on these pages is pompous, superficial, hackneyed. Aurora knows how to bring you down to reality with a thump. Walter Lezcano