Comemadre
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Literary Latin American Flatliners: a smart, engrossing, and darkly funny novel experimenting with where life and love begin and end.
On the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1907, Doctor Quintana pines for head nurse Menéndez while he and his colleagues embark on a grisly series of experiments to investigate the line between life and death. One hundred years later, a celebrated artist goes to extremes in search of aesthetic transformation, turning himself into an art object. How far are we willing to go, Larraquy asks, in pursuit of transcendence? The world of Comemadre is full of vulgarity, excess, and farce: strange ants that form almost perfect circles, missing body parts, obsessive love affairs, and flesh-eating plants. Here the monstrous is not alien, but the consequence of our relentless pursuit of collective and personal progress.
Roque Larraquy
Roque Larraquy (Buenos Aires, 1975) is the author of the novels La comemadre (2011), nominated for the USA National Book Awards (2018), the National Translation Book Award (2018) and the Dublin Literary Award (2020); Informe sobre ectoplasma animal (2014), a book illustrated by visual artist Diego Ontivero; and The National Telepathy, chosen as one the best ten books in Spanish of 2020 by The New York Times , and so far translated into Portuguese, English and French. Until 2022 Larraquy was the inaugural director of the BA in Creative Writing at the Universidad Nacional de Las Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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Heather Cleary
Translated by
Heather Cleary’s translations include Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets (finalist, BTBA 2013) and The Dark (nominee, National Translation Award 2014), and a selection of Oliverio Girondo’s poetry for New Directions. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and has served as a judge for the BTBA and the PEN Translation Award. She is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translator collective and a founding editor of the digital, bilingual Buenos Aires Review.
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