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LA SED (THIRST)

Marina Yuszczuk

Voted Best Book of 2020 by Argentina's El Perfil, this is a genre-bending breakout novel from one of the most exciting new voices of Latin America's feminist gothic.

Across two different time periods, two women confront death, violence, eroticism, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. It is the twilight of Europe's bloody bacchanals, of murder and feasting without end. A vampire arrives from Europe to the coast of Buenos Aires in the nineteenth century and for the second time in her life, watches as villages transform into a cosmopolitan city, one that will soon be ravaged by yellow fever. She must adapt, intermingle with humans, be discreet. The novel's second half takes us to the present day and is narrated by a woman who finds herself at an impasse as she grapples with letting go of her dying mother and her own relationship to motherhood. From the dramatically bloody deaths of vampire's victims to the sterile deathbed of a twenty-first century hospital room, the encounter between the out-of-place gothic heroine on the one hand and the mortally bored woman on the other ignites this scintillating novel in which the weight of Buenos Aires's tumultuous past resurfaces in the familial dramas of the present. With echoes of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN and Carmen María Machado's HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES, LA SED plays with the boundaries of literary genres while exploring the limits of female agency, the all-consuming power of desire, and the fragile vitality of even the most immortal of creatures. Marina Yuszczuk was born in Argentina in 1978. She is a writer and founding editor of Rosa Iceberg press. She is the author of various books of poetry, including LO QUE LA GENTE HACE (Blatt & Ríos, 2012), MADRE SOL-TERA (Mansalva, 2014; Las afueras, 2020), and LA OLA DE FRÍO POLAR (Gog y Magog, 2015). She has also published the short story collections LOS ARREGLOS (Rosa Iceberg, 2017) and ¿ALGUIEN SERÁ FELIZ? (Blatt & Ríos, 2019) and the novel LA INOCENCIA (Iván Rosado, 2017, forthcoming re-issue from Blatt & Ríos, 2021). She has a PhD in literature from Universidad Nacional de la Plata and is a film critic for Argentina's Página/12.

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Book Published by Dutton

Comments

Marina Yuszczuk's novel... moves from the sensuality of women's bodies as they consume the blood of others with pleasure, to a confrontation with death, this transition towards pain that's both one of bewilderment and submission. Female sisterhood, the eroticism of the flesh without intellectual interference, and the entrance into other possible worlds, where happiness is a head of hair thrown back and the corner of lips stained with red blood.

UK & Commonwealth: Scribe ; Mexiko: Dharma Books ; Colombia: Himpar

Der Horror, der Alltag und sie. Gleich mehrere lateinamerikanische Autorinnen beleben zurzeit ein uraltes Genre neu aber mit dem Grauen und den Gespenstern der Wirklichkeit, in der sie leben. Read more...

A novel that can be read as fantasy or horror, and that is actually talking about the most primitive aspects of humanity: sexual desire and the maternal bond. Two elements that permeate all of Yuszczuk's writing.

Calls to mind the classic gothic writing of Mary Shelley, or even Daphne du Mau-rier or Shirley Jackson, but manages to feel utterly contemporary in its themes and its genre-blurring approach.

With precision and audacity, Marina Yuszczuk's new novel La sed commits to reflecting on ways of processing death, the possibilities for accompanying a loved one in that trance, and how these practices have been modified over time while always implying a surrender of sorts and a movement that requires a certain solitude.

In La sed [...] both [stories] are told in the first person and encountered like a mirror, or else a door that connects the gothic literary tradition with the intimist writing of our times.

Such are the two female protagonists of La sed, Marina Yuszcuk's second novel, two kindred narrators in a novel divided in two parts but with a singular purpose made of pure thirst, the avid motor of desire that never ceases nor rests its drive until the last page [...] To immerse oneself in what La sed explores as a work of vampire fiction - using the term metaphorically as well - is to enter into a storyline without noticing the artifice of its writing.

As in all great monster novels, Marina Yuszczuk's is a novel that meditates on the ways in which systems of normality are constructed. In the end, it's not a mirror for human suffering that the vampire offers the world of the living but rather: the possibility of an escape.

It takes courage to write about vampires: they are the greatest of monsters, but also the most trivialized. Marina Yuszczuk manages to bring hers to life in this intimate take on the genre, which also weaves together grief, the history of Buenos Aires, and the voracity of desire.