AUSTRAL

A literature professor is compelled to untangle a mentor’s posthumous writings in this work of metafiction.

Julio Gamboa, the protagonist of Costa Rica–born Fonseca’s third novel, has headed from Cincinnati to a small town in northern Argentina’s desert, where Aliza Abravanel, a friend and mentor from decades back, has recently died. Aliza was a brilliant novelist and photojournalist, but a stroke rendered her mute in the last decade of her life and slowed her career. Still, she’s completed a pair of unpublished manuscripts, titled Sketches for a Private Language and Dictionary of Loss, and one of her dying wishes is that Julio read them. Cue a knotty travelogue of intellectual and South American terrain. Julio explores Aliza’s past, which has a loose connection to New Germany, a haven for antisemites founded in Paraguay in the 1880s; in a roundabout way, that ugly history is passed down to Aliza’s father and then Aliza herself. The prevailing themes are clear: violence, colonialism, and how many stories of both go unspoken or land in “that invisible border where fiction blurred into memory.” But Fonseca approaches this in a variety of registers, from semiotic musings on the expressive capacity of language (there’s a fair number of Wittgenstein references), history lessons (much of the story touches on the 1980s Guatemalan genocide), and Aliza’s writings, which blend fact and fiction, image and text. Which is to say that Fonseca conjures a very Sebald-ian mood, and translator McDowell ably distinguishes his purposeful stylistic shifts. The reader may feel much like Julio does when reading Aliza’s manuscripts: “too many possible points of entry, too many coded trajectories.” But as a study of the confusions of history and the challenge of language to get the story right, it’s an admirably complex, intellectually searching work.

A sage, brainy study of language and history.