No es un río
Published by
France Métailié / Brazil Todavía Livros / Italy Rizzoli /USA Graywolf Press / UK Charco Press / Germany Berenberg Verlag / Netherlands Uitgeverij Vleugels
Novel on the long-list for The International Booker Prize
Winner of the XV IILA-Letteratura Award 2023 (in its Italian version by Rizzoli, “Non è un fiume”)
The novel tells the story of two friends, Enero and El Negro, who take Tilo, the teenage son of Eusebio —their recently deceased friend— fishing to the Paraná River.While they drink and cook and talk and dance, they try to overcome the ghosts of their past and those of the present— their mood altered by wine and torpor.
This intimate, peculiar moment connecting the lives of these three men also links them to the lives of the local inhabitants of this nature universe, surrounded by water and ruled by its own laws.
There are losses, premature deaths… But there is also the stubborn vitality of nature: a bush covered with ancient trees, animals, birds; the river bearing life in its entrails, the people born and raised in this landscape which they protect with nails and teeth against intruders.
This story, that flows like the river, talks about the love between friends, the love of a mother for her daughters, and the love of the islanders for their river and everything that lives in it.
This masterful novel shows once again her unique voice and extraordinary sensitivity, letting its characters shine and express in action what the depths of their souls harbour.
Best Books of 2020 inClarín and La Nación
Shortlisted for the Mario Vargas Llosa Novel Prize
Nature, gestures, the elements, soaks the psychology of the story, whose intensity and contrasts evoke the technique of xylography, used in this case with dazzling mastery. Ignacio Echevarría
I always read Selva Almada with devotion, but in order to finish No es un río I had to stand up in the middle of my living room and read it aloud. How much wellness comes from good literature. Samanta Schweblin
The most admirable aspect of No es un río is the way the author builds a space for meanings that travel between fantasy and realism. Marta Sanz
Selva Almada builds a lyricism of harshness, of scant words, a lyricism in which the strong and hard patched hands of her characters barely need to be mentioned in order to be felt. They touch you. Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Diario Clarín
Not a River plunges us straight into the depths of its silences, bracingly so – the longer the quiet goes, the more terrible the rupture. Manuel Muñoz
With incisive, lacerating writing that softens as the story progresses, Almada carries the reader to a place where pain, betrayal and fear are part of everyday life in the provinces. Le Monde
Almada’s prose is sparse, but the details count. Her ear for dialogue and especially gossip is pitch perfect. Her eye for detail is hawkish. LA Review of Books
Almada burns off all the dross and gives us pure revelation, cryptic and true. Paul Harding
The language reaches the condensation of poetry. The sentences are extremely short; the descriptions, adjusted; the images, precise. Verónica Voix, Diario La Nación
Selva Almada, like Clare Keegan, describes the floating silence and in this last novel she does so with the silence left by the death of those men, in that mountain, in that river. Radar Libros / Página 12
An elegant and well-developed literary language with an enormous accurateness that allows her characters a thickness and a credibility that is very uncommon. Martín Parra, Cine y literatura
In her stories the earth speaks (…), nature makes itself being heard. Diario La Nación
She portrays with the accuracy of a sniper. Not only people with their vertigo, but also the rivers and the night. Mean, precise, rough and even so, voluptuous. Lara Moreno
Selva Almada provides No es un río with an enormous strength thanks to a writing where local customs and manners become poetry. Elvira Navarro
A tenacious prose, violent, polished and quietened, that moistens as it flows. Eider Rodriguez
It is a real delight to navigate in such a rich Spanish, so full of sensations. El cultural
Selva Almada has consolidated a prose whose pillars become clearer every time: a poetical search within orality, a notable presence of the rural geography that becomes another added character and a tone that goes deeply into evocation and evanescence rather than into highlighting or the mere pamphlet. Pablo Díaz Merenghi, La Agenda
Almada confirms her mastery in the creation of atmospheres of growing darkness, where hazard opens way to tragedy. El cultural
One of the great renovators of the Spanish American novel. El cultural