by Elsa Drucaroff
Translated by Slava Faybysh
Cover Artwork by Barry McKay
Published by Corylus Books
You don't need a busy cover to say a lot. This one says so much.
It takes a lot of talent & skill to tell a story that people really want to read. It's a hard task for a picture book, short story collection, a novel & writing of any kind. Stories that weave real-life people & events into a great work of fiction seem to know how to grab my attention very quickly. This one definitely kept my attention! Though it's a very different type of story, Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris & published by Duckworth Books, is another brilliant example of truth meets fiction I thoroughly recommend.
I've been looking forward to Rodolfo Walsh's Last Case for a while now.
*A key figure in the politics & literature of Argentina, Rodolfo Walsh wrote his iconic Letter to My Friends in December 1976, recounting the murder of his daughter, Victoria by the military dictatorship. Just a few months later, he was killed in a shoot-out - just one of tens of thousands of victims of the Junta*
With fascinating characters & unique situations, this story could not possibly avoid friction, tension & danger. They're occupational hazards when people choose to mix their personal skills & beliefs with political involvement.
The friction explodes in endless directions & even simple actions can put anyone in danger, even family members.
Losing his daughter could have been the spark that ignited the future violence, following his controversial *Letter to My Friends* & vastly increasing Rodolfo's own vulnerability.
Though he thought himself more of a revolutionary than a writer, Rodolfo Walsh absolutely chose to fight the underworld battles with his words instead of violence.
Walsh's life has been studied in literary circles & is seen as a paradigm shifter. This book has been years in the making. Walsh's own work has even been given as study material to students by the author herself, Elsa Drucaroff, early on when the story began to brew.
We have to wonder how different things could have been for so many people - but this kind of corruption exists globally in numerous variants. I've experienced life during hostilities in Bosnia & Croatia - every situation is different.
The places between real events & fiction are carefully blended like a grey-scale pencil sketch created by a skilled artist.
Living in such tense environments is entirely unimaginable for most of us. This is such an eye-opening book & I hope more people will explore the writing that's made available by the Corylus Books team.
About the Author
Elsa Drucaroff was born and raised in Buenos Aires. She is the author of four novels and two short story collections, in addition to being a prolific essayist. She has published numerous articles on Argentine literature, literary criticism and feminism. Her work has been widely translated, but Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case is Elsa Drucaroff’s first novel to be translated into English.
About the translator
Slava Faybysh lives in Chicago and is an up-and-coming translator from two languages: Spanish and Russian into English. His translations have been published in the New England Review, History Magazine, Asymptote Journal, Latin American Literature Today, and Another Chicago Magazine, among others. His translation of Leopoldo Bonafulla’s anarchist memoir The July Revolution: Barcelona 1909 was published by AK Press in 2021.
Thank you Corylus Books for having me on this tour.
It's fantastic to see a great independent publisher bringing rich, foreign-language writing to life in an English-speaking environment via amazing authors & translators.
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