Here Be Icebergs

by Katya Adaui, Rosalind Harvey (Translator)

Overview

The weird, fetid, familiar discomfort of family is front and centre in these short stories of all the ways we remain a mystery to each other.

The mysteries of kinship (families born into and families made) take disconcerting and familiar shapes in these refreshingly frank short stories. A family is haunted by a beast that splatters fruit against its walls every night, another undergoes a near-collision with a bus on the way home from the beach. Mothers are cold, fathers are absent—we know these moments in the abstract, but Adaui makes each as uncanny as our own lives: close but not yet understood.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781913867195
Publisher:	Charco Press
Publication date:	06/14/2022
Pages:	133
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

Katya Adaui was born in Lima in 1977. She is the author of the books of short stories Geografía de la oscuridad (Geography of Obscurity), Aquí hay icebergs (Here Be Icebergs), Algo se nos ha escapado (Something Escaped Us) and the novel Nunca sabré lo que entiendo (I’ll Never Know What I Understand). She has also written the children’s books Patichueca and Muy Muy en Bora Bora . She holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero in Argentina. She lives in Buenos Aires where she teaches writing workshops. 

Rosalind Harvey was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018. Her translation of Juan Pablo Villalobos’ debut novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, was shortlisted for the 2011 Guardian First Book Award and the 2012 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her latest translation of his work, I’ll Sell You A Dog, was longlisted for the International DUBLIN Literary Award. She has worked on books by Guadalupe Nettel, Elvira Navarro, Enrique Vila-Matas and Héctor Abad Faciolince and is currently working on a YA title about the journeys of teenage Central American immigrants to the United States. Rosalind is also chair and co founder of the Emerging Translators Network and is a Teaching Fellow in Spanish and Translation Studies at the Universityof Warwick.

Table of Contents

1 The Hunger Angel 1

2 If Anything Ever Happens to Us 29

3 The Colour of Ice 45

4 Alaska 55

5 That Horse 61

6 Where the Hunts Take Place 65

7 This is the Man 75

8 We, the Shipwrecked 83

9 Lovebird 89

10 The Hamberes Twins 99

11 Gardening 105

12 Seven Waves 115

Editorial Reviews

"haunting….Adaui’s poetic prose elevates the poignancy of these mostly somber stories" —Publishers Weekly

"A kaleidoscopic collection that takes a sharp, dark look at family and how we survive it." —Kirkus

"A softly beguiling book that pulls the reader into its complexity and investigation of deeply vicious themes." —The Arts Desk

"Brief, incendiary tales, flaring into being." —Irish Times

"With this book Katya Adaui consolidates her position as one of the most subtle and original Peruvian writers in recent years." —El País

"Adaui belongs to a resurgence of women storytellers who have restored the pleasure of reading stories that leave us suffering from their sweet intoxication." —WMagazín

From the Publisher

2022-03-30
Childhood is the dangerous terrain of an inhospitable landscape in these short stories by Lima-born writer Adaui.

As two girls chat by a pool, the nearby adults think how lovely and relaxed they are. “They’re wrong,” the narrator says. “We’re practising how to endure everything life has in store for us.” In this collection, pain and misunderstandings echo through generations. Parents beat and blame their children and later demand to be respected. “You know why I’m so hard on you, don’t you?” a mother asks her daughter. “So that you’ll be the strongest of all my children.” In one tale, a family is terrorized by an unseen monster that bombards the house with fruit, their claustrophobic fear heightened by the suspicion that one of them is responsible. “Against all odds, we survived Christmas,” begins a story about a family outing to the beach that ends at a police station; “Not for anything in the world would I be one year old again,” the narrator says, “and live through everything I’ve lived through before now.” In another story, also featuring a harrowing drive, a young man remembers his mother telling him, “Getting through childhood is to survive the worst of all tsunamis.” Adaui's stories tend to begin in medias res, with much left unstated, the text only the visible part of a looming iceberg. Along with violence and threats of violence are rarer moments of appreciation and clarity. About the boyhood of one character and his friends: “It was a period when we cried seldom and felt a great deal.” An imprisoned politician with time on his hands finds solace planting trees: “All mornings repeated themselves in the only verb it was possible to conjugate: to wait.” In one tale, family history is arranged around locations on a map, “a fragmented story—none is linear—emerging,” a description which fits the book as a whole.

A kaleidoscopic collection that takes a sharp, dark look at family and how we survive it.

Kirkus Reviews