Stranger to the Moon

by Evelio Rosero, Anne McLean (Translator), Victor Meadowcroft (Translator)

Overview

A fantastical novel about power and subservience by the great Evelio Rosero, winner of Colombia’s National Literature Prize

The renowned Colombian writer Evelio Rosero has never been one to shy away from the darker aspects of his nation’s history and society. His magnificent novel Stranger to the Moon portrays a world that seems to exist outside time and place but taps into the dark myths and collective subconscious of his country, with its harrowing inequality and violence. A parable of pointed social criticism, with naked humans imprisoned in a house in order to serve the needs of “the vicious clothed ones,” the novel describes what ensues when a single “naked one” privately rebels, risking his own death and that of his fellow prisoners. Each subsequent section of the book adds further layers to the ritualistic and bizarre social order inhabited by its characters. Insects and reptiles are trained as agents and spies against the naked ones, and only the most fortunate humans manage to reach old age by taking up strategic spots near the kitchens and grabbing for the fiercely contested food. Stranger to the Moon is a brave, powerful, and distinctive novel by a writer who arguably holds the strongest claim to the title of Colombia’s greatest living author.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811228626
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	09/07/2021
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	1,030,324
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Evelio Rosero was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1958. He was awarded Colombia’s National Literature Prize by the Ministry of Culture in 2006 for his body of work, which includes several novels, short story collections, and books for young readers and children. The Armies, Rosero’s first novel to be translated into English, won the Tusquets International Prize and the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Anne McLean lives in Toronto and has translated the works of authors including Javier Cercas, Julio Cortázar, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and Enrique Vila-Matas.

Victor Meadowcroft is based in Brighton, England, and translates from the Spanish and Portuguese.

Editorial Reviews

07/12/2021

Colombian writer Rosero (The Armies) delivers a taut allegory about inequality and abuse in which one set of people, who are clothed, oppress those who are made to stay naked. The naked live apart from the clothed in an overcrowded house without enough food. The clothed revel in forcing menial, sexual, and degrading tasks upon the naked, as well as torturing and executing them via luridly sadistic means involving barbed wire, excrement, hot coals, and more. The narrator lives in a wardrobe in the house, alone except for when the clothed arrive to throw parties for themselves at the expense of the naked, and stuff those they consider undesirable into the wardrobe. Gradually, a story emerges in the narrator’s acts of rebellion, beginning with a refusal to allow the clothed to examine the narrator’s sexual organs, and culminating with an uncomfortable truth linking oppressed and oppressor. Throughout, Rosero’s prose, translated with lyricism by McLean, conveys the characters’ horrifying human nature with aplomb (on the clothed: “they arrive sometimes like a fantastic whirlwind, whooping with excitement, and at other times with heads bowed, as if already repenting of the great error they wish to commit”). Disturbing and powerful, this one is hard to forget. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"This is a hallucinatory read, brief and bizarre, and yet the murky boundaries, pathological masochism, and fascistic pull toward brutality it depicts tap into a frighteningly familiar human need to destroy—one we’ve seen reflected in the political realities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."

The Paris Review - Rhian Sasseen

"Rosero affirms unashamedly that literature can and should change social reality…"

BOMB Magazine - Antonio Ungar

"Disobedience is possible, though it’s a cruel truth that the only record of it lies in the graveyard. A counterrevolutionary force seems to have coalesced and quashed any sign of resistance. The novella, from this angle, is an account of a reactionary coalition’s long stay in power, one so protracted and deep that the oppressors are completely entangled with and dependent upon those they afflict."

The Review of Uncontemporary Fiction - Matt Weir

"Rosero takes the absurd kernel of a character living in a wardrobe and imagines a surrounding world to explain it, sketching boundaries with the rigorous inner logic of a dream. Counterintuitive as it might seem, in Rosero’s hands the novella...proves, in this case, to be the ideal world-building vehicle. Sly manipulation of tense allows 87 pages to do the work of a book three times in length, yet efficiency is no end in itself."

Full Stop - William Repass

"The Armies is a disturbing allegory of life during wartime, in which little appears to happen while at the same time entire lives and worlds collapse."

(London) Times

"The translation of Good Offices (2011) is sublime. Moving from offbeat humor to soaring spritual ecstasy, it has both pathos and punch."

The Guardian - Maya Jaggi

★ 2021-08-18
Recalling the work of Kafka and de Sade, a nightmarish fable explores timeless questions about violence and subjugation, power and freedom.

The celebrated Rosero is no stranger to the darker regions of the human imagination, whether in his previous novels of Colombian politics and history or in his latest, a mythical story whose world is removed from ours; as in a fairy tale, it exists outside any recognizable place while reflecting, from a tilt, the violent history of modern nation-states. The novel examines a group of naked prisoners who have been put away in an enormous but cramped house where they are forced to serve the higher caste of “clothed ones.” From the shadows of the wardrobe in which he's been sentenced to live, the narrator, a "naked one," describes his silent and interior rebellion against the clothed ones, unravelling this small society’s structures and rituals in all their nuance and complexity. We learn, for example, that all naked ones possess both sexes, each individual essentially choosing their gender at some point in their youth. Though clothed ones arrive at the house whenever they like, naked ones can't leave the house without being harassed and attacked, subject to elaborate, innovative forms of torture. And while the clothed ones will elect certain naked ones to favor and protect, the weakest of the naked ones are maimed or even die of starvation at young ages. Rosero packs great depth within a brief novel through brisk chapters that can change tone as the ambivalent narrator wavers among resentment, anger, and defeat. Though the world of this story is bleak—sometimes almost unbearably so—the narrator’s soliloquies on agency in the midst of captivity and degradation are timeless, haunting, and extremely powerful.

A profound work of dark and brutal truth.

Kirkus Reviews