Fate

by Jorge Consiglio, Carolina Orloff (Translator), Fionn Petch (Translator)

Overview

This novel focuses on a group of characters who are all in different ways endeavouring to take control of their fate. Their desire to lead a genuine existence forces them to confront difficult decisions, and to break out of comfortable routines.Karl and Marina have been together for ten years and have a young son, Simón. Karl is a German-born oboist at Argentina’s national orchestra, and Marina is a meteorologist. On a field trip, she meets fellow researcher Zárate, and what might have been just a fling starts to erode the foundations of her marriage. Then there is Amer, a dynamic and successful taxidermist. At a group therapy session for smokers, Amer falls for the younger Clara. While the relationship between Karl and Marina disintegrates, the love story between Amer and Clara is just beginning – or is it already at an end? One of Argentina’s leading contemporary writers, Jorge Consiglio portrays the inner worlds of these characters through the minute details of their everyday lives, laying bare their strivings and their frustrations with a wry gaze, and seeking in this close-up texture a deeper truth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781999368463
Publisher:	Charco Press
Publication date:	05/18/2021
Pages:	117
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jorge Consiglio was born in Buenos Aires in 1962. He has published several novels including: El bien (The Good, 2003; Award for Emerging Writers, Opera Prima, Spain), Gramática de la sombra (Grammar of the Shadows, 2007; Third Municipal Prize for Novels), Pequeñas intenciones (Small Intentions, 2011; Second National Prize for Novels, First Municipal Prize for Novels, re-published in 2019), Hospital Posadas (2015), Tres Monedas (2018), published by Charco as Fate (2020) and Sodio (2021), forthcoming from Charco as Sodium . They have all been awarded prizes in Argentina and in Spain. He has also published three collections of short stories, including Villa del Parque (2016), published by Charco Press as Southerly (2018), five books of poems and a book of essays.

Originally from Buenos Aires and now based in Edinburgh, Carolina Orloff is an experienced translator and researcher in Latin American literature. In 2016, Carolina co-founded Charco Press, where she acts as Publishing Director and Chief Editor. She is also the co-translator of Ariana Harwicz’s novels Die, My Love, Feebleminded and Tender, and of Jorge Consiglio’s Fate .

Fionn Petch is a Scottish-born translator working from Spanish, Italian and French into English. He lived in Mexico City for 12 years, where he completed a PhD in Philosophy at the UNAM. His translations of Latin American literature for Charco Press have been widely acclaimed. Fireflies by Luis Sagasti was shortlisted for the Translators’ Association First Translation Award 2018. The Distance Between Us by Renato Cisneros received an English PEN Award in 2018. A Musical Offering, also by Luis Sagasti, was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021 and won the Society of Authors Premio Valle Inclán 2021 for best translation from Spanish. He now lives in Berlin.

Read an Excerpt

Amer mixed onion, tomato and avocado. He added salt, pepper, oil and lemon. Nothing special. Just a quick snack. A guacamole. He spread it over a piece of toast and ate it slowly. He had reverted to his habit of standing while eating. He took his time to chew. He savoured the acidity while he let his mind catch in a tangle of ideas that, after a few minutes, wove together, generating a kind of atmosphere, something vague yet as vividly present as the taste of onion now dancing in his mouth.A light bulb hung above his head.The boiler to the right, the fridge to the left. He hadn’t eaten a thing in six hours. He took a sip of red wine. He hesitated, then added a couple of squirts from the soda siphon. He took a quick inhalation of air through his nose – a sigh in reverse – and in this action, as with everything he did that night, pleasure prevailed. Each occurrence, however small and insignificant, was lit by the gleam of celebration. Everything fastened together in a joyful line. Something unstoppable: a chain of wise choices and well-being.He had spent the afternoon working on a brocket deer. It was a small animal and it was in very good shape. Its fur remained unruffled, its snout still pink; only the corneas attested to the final violence.Amer had fulfilled his tasks in strict silence since the age of ten. He blinked rarely, almost never: his tear film was remarkably resilient. What’s more, his everyday work, the toil that paid the bills, justified it; that is, it gave him a reason to live. Amer was delicate: his fingertips were chrysalid-like, as if made of gauze. He was also extremely neat. Neat and delicate, two qualities hugely appreciated in his profession. He believed in giving the benefit of the doubt, in taking things slow, in the steadiness of habit.As per usual, after work, he stood in front of his TV, remote control in hand.The brightness of the screen, its pyrotechnics, was simply spectacular. He flicked from channel to channel.He did this for a while,attentive to the light alone.The images lasted only a few seconds: a male broadcaster in shorts, a set of retractable claws, a crowd, the snowy peak of Cocuy, a plate of food, three aeroplanes up in the air, a plant growing, a building in Richmond, Saturn, the seas of the Moon, Saturn, fish gills, a weather graphic in all its splendour.Yet only one thing persisted in his mind: the image of a brown bear, hibernating. It was a huge beast, but its body still suggested the clumsy movements of a cub. It looked gentle. One of its eyes, the left, was barely open and through it, through that slit, bright as a spark, flashed menace, pure irrationality. Lingering on the image of the bear,Amer went into the kitchen, sharpened a knife against a second blade, and began chopping onions.

Editorial Reviews

"A moving testament to the beauty and banality of human relationships." —Publishers Weekly

"A masterpiece that refuses to stay still." —Culture Trip

"Fate could be likened to a pointillist painting by Seurat, with each dab of colour and each descriptive passage contributing to what is finally a beautifully structured and brilliantly shimmering whole." —New York Magazine (The Strategist UK)

"In the realm of fiction, an author has total authority over their characters, and they can inject interactions with meaning and pattern-play in a way therapists warn us not to in our day to day lives. It takes a particular level of craftsmanship to do this at the level of the sentence, with the effortlessness that Consiglio seamlessly achieves, and to sweep a reader so tenderly into the progress." —White Review

"A muted and unhurried novel that insists on the validity of the imperfect present." —Kirkus

"The beauty of this novel...is that it provides no answers, but many questions. It can be reflected upon, re-read, and reconsidered." —BookBlast

"The language of Fate has teeth and claws." —Books and Bao

"Fate is a rich tapestry of language, a sharp depiction of the vagaries of fate and a thoughtful meditation on the human condition." —The Monthly Booking

"Consiglio’s writing aches with poetry through its attention and complexity." —The Skinny

"Packed full of sensuality and written in fresh, candid prose." —The Quietus

Praise for Jorge Consiglio

"Employing a language that is sharp, concise and visceral, it proves his talent as a natural storyteller and as a social chronicler and poet of some refinement." —Morning Star

"There is a timeless quality to Consiglio’s prose...a storyteller of rare ingenuity." —Splice

"His stories are told with dispassionate realism while being varnished with a surrealist gloss, creating his own in-between style...Occasional poetic turns reminiscent of Pablo Neruda erupt within the narrative." —Culture Trip

"[Consiglio] carves out a singular space by focusing on characters who do not quite have a place of their own." —Full Stop

From the Publisher

2021-03-03
Award-winning Argentinian poet and novelist Consiglio explores the idea of destiny in the quotidian lives of four characters in Buenos Aires.

A taxidermist named Amer makes guacamole. Marina, a meteorologist, fights an infestation of ants in her kitchen and later takes her young son, Simón, to swimming lessons. Her husband, Karl, a German oboist, walks home from rehearsal, missing his eldest daughter back in Europe. In short chapters full of minute detail, we follow these characters' lives. Attempting to quit smoking, Amer joins a self-help group and falls for a young woman named Clara. Marina turns 40. She does not believe in coincidences and consults an I Ching app on her phone. Her husband struggles with the feeling that living in Buenos Aires has changed him. "Karl was someone else but also himself. This fact—so obscure that he found it hard to put into words—materialised in a blurry and seemingly unfounded sorrow which was hard to shake off." He buys his wife an orange vibrator for a birthday present and hides it, unwrapped, in their son's room. In a different book, the vibrator would be discovered there, occasioning a scene of some kind. But Consiglio is not interested in cause and effect but in the accretion of granular detail. The taxidermist applies the tiniest amount of vegetable oil to the glass eyes of a stuffed otter: "The smallest of details: two strokes to the right, two to the left. That was his secret: it gave a sparkle to the gaze." While this reporting of mundane action can leave the reader longing for a more traditional plot, the novel is interesting in the way it challenges that expectation, gesturing toward a broader truth. On her way home after a liaison, the adulterous Marina, moistening her lips in the mirror, "imagined that thousands of people—people crossing the city in taxis—were doing the same, exactly the same, at that very instant. To a point, she thought the harmony that brought them all together erased the very notion of individuality. Then, with her eyes still shut, she went a bit further still: she said to herself that she, with all her infidelity, neglect, secrets and guilt, was simply performing a cliché that humanity had repeated over and over again since the beginning of time."

A muted and unhurried novel that insists on the validity of the imperfect present.

Kirkus Reviews