Proceed With Caution: Stories and a Novella

by Patricia Ratto, Andrea Labinger (Translator)

Overview

In the tradition of surrealist masters Julio Cortázar and Leonora Carrington, and joining contemporaries Guadalupe Nettel (Bezoar & Other Unsettling Stories) and Samanta Schweblin (Mouthful of Birds), Argentine writer Patricia Ratto’s English language debut collection, Proceed With Caution, offers an alternate reality that is both mysterious and familiar. Whether it’s a malevolent act born from the paranoia of living under a totalitarian regime, or the creeping sense of dread blanketing a small whaling town, the stories in Proceed With Caution linger in the memory, and make us question where the natural world ends and the supernatural begins. In “Rara Avis” a baby bird is rescued after dropping from the sky, only to transform from vulnerable creature to life-threatening menace. In the powerfully moving title story, an old woman lives out her final days accompanied by a mysterious doglike being that provides comfort even as it devours her memories. And in the novella “Submerged,” an Argentine submarine crew during the Falklands War of the early 1980s navigates its way through a claustrophobic nightmare of boredom and terror, where the very meaning of being alive is cast in doubt. Translated from the Spanish by PEN/Heim award-winner Andrea G. Labinger, Proceed With Caution is a striking collection, brimming with emotion, animal instinct, and a sense of wonder that announces the arrival of a compelling new voice in Latin American literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781943156849
Publisher:	Schaffner Press
Publication date:	01/19/2021
Pages:	172
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Patricia Ratto is an acclaimed writer from Argentina. Andrea Labinger is a translator of Spanish and South American literature.
 

Editorial Reviews

11/09/2020

Argentinian writer Ratto’s revelatory if underpowered English-language debut collects stories and a novella featuring intensely watchful, unassuming narrators who imbue the stories with a sense of foreboding. The best entry is the title piece, in which a lonely woman becomes attracted to a man who strongly resembles a dog, or perhaps is a dog. As their relationship edges toward intimacy, the uncertainty around it is creepy, tantalizing, and indicative of the larger perils in human relationships altogether. In several other stories, the narrators are uninvolved observers with a touch of the voyeur, watching the butchering of whales (“Quintay”), a handsome blond server (“Neko Café”), and a battling couple in a fancy car (“Black Dog”). Most of these feel a bit undeveloped, though “Submerged,” the novella, finds some depth. The unnamed protagonist is stuck on a submarine with a full crew. Water is rationed, the submarine’s captain does not dare surface for fear of attack, and the narrator is progressively losing feeling in his legs as he struggles to live “with the illusion that... everything might return to the way it was in the old days.” The highlights are worth the price of admission. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Seldom has the clandestine nature of observation been so luminous as in Patricia Ratto's excellent Proceed With Caution." —Terese Svoboda, Author of Great American Desert


"Argentinian writer Ratto's revalatory [...] English-language debut collects stories and a novella featuring intensely watchful, unassuming narrators who imbue the stories with a sense of foreboding." —Publishers Weekly


"Often eerie, sometimes bizarrely comical, other times head-shakingly disconcerting...Argentinian writer Patricia Ratto makes an engrossing English-language debut with eight stories and a novella that prove—in a word—highly unpredictable." —Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness

From the Publisher