Last year I read a press copy short book, new in translation from Archipelago Books. January was the first novel by Argentine writer Sara Gallardo, and it follows some days and nights in the life of a young woman in the countryside.
January is proving hard to write about. On a second reading, it’s a pretty amazing work. It’s a pastoral novel, but it’s not cyclical and relaxed in its pacing: it’s a tense countdown, for reasons that will be clear. It’s not idyllic but oppressive and grueling. Chores start at dawn, so the milk can get to the town market on time.
She becomes immersed in the dirty sweet smell of her work, the heat of the cow, and the dull sound of the alternating streams of milk hitting the bucket. Why am I so upset? I knew this would happen… A drop of milk hits her; she unties the cow and goes to the next one.
What has happened is that the rancher’s daughter Nefer has been raped, and is pregnant. It’s only a matter of time before she’ll start showing. Will she go to the wise woman’s house? Confess at Church tomorrow? The translation by Riddle and Shaughnessy conveys a deft reportorial style with a haunting use of scenery for this heartbreaking character study.
Gallardo was born in Buenos Aires in 1931, to a family line of authors, public figures, and politicians of both center-right and social democratic parties active throughout the 19th century. The notable Catholic family had accumulated an immense library in their home, and Sara was bathed in literature from an early age (her sister Marta became an editor and her brother Jorge went on to write journalism).
She spent decades of travelling through America and Europe while writing novels and articles. When her second husband died in the mid ‘70s, she settled with her two children in Barcelona, though she would continue to pick up her feet and travel from city to city. In 1988, while visiting Buenos Aires, she suffered a fatal asthma attack at the age of 56.
What really hits you about January is Nefer’s innocence, her fear and confusion. Her predicament is colored by her crush on Negro Ramos, so that she wishfully thinks he’s fathered the child she carries. “But it’s not his… Yes, yes it is, it’s his…No, it’s not…But it is Negro’s fault, it’s definitely his fault.”
The countryside of Argentina is vast and green, full of the sound of frogs and crickets, and Nefer physically experiences this world intensely:
She thinks that today this thing filling her up inside, choking her, might turn against her, pound at the walls, so she prefers to wait outside leaning against a tree. There she stands in the dirt that stretches monotonously beneath her feet out to the horizon, and she lets her eyes rest on every hair, every swirl in the fur of the dog she is petting.
All the while the organism within her grows “like a black mushroom.”
There’s a lot going up against Nefer with this situation, including a domineering and unrelentingly cruel mother. It’s no wonder she struggles just to rally the wherewithal to help herself. The actual solution that this parochial society has in store is almost worse than Nefer’s own metaphysical imaginings. It’s these impressions that make the present tense narration really effective, beyond mere immediate reporting.
I won’t give anything else away, so I’ll leave it here for this small letter.