COMEMADRE, BY ROQUE LARRAQUY, TRANSLATED BY HEATHER CLEARY
Like a child born with two heads, Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre, translated by Heather Cleary, comprises a bifurcation that appears both antagonistic and intimately bound. In the book’s first half, set in a sanatorium on the outskirts of Buenos Aires at the beginning of the 20th century, a doctor contemplates his awkward infatuation with the head nurse while, in an attempt to unravel a medical mystery, a group of scientists decapitate cancer patients under false pretenses. A hundred years later, the second-half concerns a child-prodigy, a young artist searching for a new project and discovering another person who looks almost identical to himself. Together, the duo travel to the same sanatorium in order to create a truly shocking work of art.
By situating both beginning and end in the same locale, Comemadre creates a full circle of the grotesqueries humans inflict upon one another in pursuit of immortality. The characters are eerie and pathological—a freckled doctor obsessed with phrenology, a woman who wears shirts with the names of different countries to convey her current mood, a photophobic prostitute—and the atmosphere vacillates between absurd and horrific, creating a sense of unease that permeates the text. Read Larraquy to experience a strange waking dream from which there is no escape.
—Review by J.T. Mahany
