Una lectora de provincia

Una lectora de provincia

Non-fiction
Editorial Ampersand, 2023
186 pages

Published by:

Italy Genesi Editrice

A town next to the railroad, a hundred kilometers away from Córdoba. Plains, countryside, immigrant voices, local tunes, stories come and go, magazines, books, voracity.

Reading is everywhere and in every period of María Teresa Andruetto’s life, the yearning for knowledge or dreaming is the same, as well as the search for the language of a writer. Reading is done at home, in the clandestinity of inner exile, then in classrooms, in workshops, in prisons, in memory recovery centers. Reading is intimate, political, relational; the library is democratic, so the memory of a provincial reader who has gone out into the world is threaded in this book with literature and with the people.

(…) a beautiful tribute to experience and literature. Diario La Gaceta

she shares her fascinating literary world (…) by weaving a unique narrative about the passion for reading. Yael Noris Ferri, La Tecl@ Eñe

As each page goes by, we feel how the history of a country vibrates within this intellectual autobiography. Daniel Arias Fuenzalida, Los Andes Newspaper

Emotional, sentimental and erudite mixture of intimate memoir and essay. Maximo Soto, Ámbito Financiero

This reader’s autobiography embraces the freedom of the essay form. At times, Andruetto’s own life fades into the background to make space for other literary lives or for critical reflections. Decentered, Una lectora de provincia presents itself as a text that escapes the temptations of mere
egotism to propose that reading without a communal connection reduces to nothing. Fernando Núñez, El diletante

Reading from the sidelines, like a ruminant, like someone who chews, gulps and brings it back from the cavities. Hernan Carbonel, La Gaceta

(…) It is the kind of book that readers will expect from an author they admire. Gustavo Pablos, La voz del interior

The Lector&s collection from Ampersand is one of the few editorial miracles in Argentina: all the books they publish suddenly acquire the status of a must-have for literature lovers. Now joining it, with a title echoing Flaubertian or Sarmientine resonances, is Una lectora de provincia by the storyteller, poet, and essayist María Teresa Andruetto. Daniel Gigena, La Nación

Una lectora de provincia (a reader from the province) becomes a writer from the province. An adventure worth telling. Walter Lezcano, Clarín

That rustic and luminous calm of her poetry is brought back in this book of memoirs, anecdotes and reflections. Mercedes Estramil, El País, Uruguay

For Andruetto, reading, like writing, is an exercise in empathy, something that is notably reflected in the profiles of writers—some of them personal friends—who marked her life’s path: Beatriz Vallejos, Mary Oliver, Circe Maia, Alejandro Schmidt… The writing of all of them shares a characteristic that the author strives to highlight in these pages as a trait that attracts and defines her: their marginality. Mercedes Álvarez