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Atacama
Firmly rooted in historical events, Atacama tells the story of Manuel Garay, the son of a communist miner/union leader and an anarchist organizer of working-class women, and Lucía Céspedes, the daughter of a fascist army officer and a socialite. A fateful turn of events leads to twelve-year-old Lucía befriending twelve-year-old Manuel, inextricably connecting them to a common denominator: Lucía’s adoring father and the perpetrator of the heinous crimes that have caused both children immeasurable suffering.
Manuel and Lucía forge a friendship that grows as they come of age and realize that their lives are not only linked by Ernesto Céspedes’ actions, but also by a deep understanding of the other’s emotional predicaments, their commitment to social justice and their belief in the power of writing and art. Set in the first half of the twentieth century, but resonating loudly with today’s changing times, beautifully crafted Atacama covers themes related to class, gender, trauma, survival and the role of art in society.
Manuel and Lucía forge a friendship that grows as they come of age and realize that their lives are not only linked by Ernesto Céspedes’ actions, but also by a deep understanding of the other’s emotional predicaments, their commitment to social justice and their belief in the power of writing and art. Set in the first half of the twentieth century, but resonating loudly with today’s changing times, beautifully crafted Atacama covers themes related to class, gender, trauma, survival and the role of art in society.
240 pages, Paperback
Published September 21, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 2, 2025
I was really disappointed by this book, as it covers such an interesting story and had so much potential for emotional impact, but the execution is so incredibly lackluster. The dialogue was hard to take seriously and events played out with such poor pacing and no depth. For example, there is a part where one of the main characters disappears, and the other gets worried about him hoping something grave hadn't befallen him. Six months later he shows up at her door and explains in the least convincing way that he fell into a slump of depression, but now he's back baby yeaaaajhh. all of this happened in a single page. there was zero point to this scene, it had no effect on the narrative progression and was written like a second grader trying to outline a character arc.
a lot of events seemed carelessly dropped in in this way - thought not quite to this extreme - without any real impact on the story or being developed in any way.
there were some well written segments (hence 2 stars), and I thought the ending was written quite well, but due to the whole book leasing up to it it did not achieve the impact it could have
a lot of events seemed carelessly dropped in in this way - thought not quite to this extreme - without any real impact on the story or being developed in any way.
there were some well written segments (hence 2 stars), and I thought the ending was written quite well, but due to the whole book leasing up to it it did not achieve the impact it could have
May 28, 2023
It’s hard to adequately express just how influential Stephen Henighan’s When Words Deny The World: The Reshaping Of Canadian Writing was for me when I first read it back in 2014.
I had oft-lamented that Canadian literature was lacking in something fundamental but didn’t possess the words to adequately articulate my rather inchoate misgivings beyond the increasingly aggrieved lament that the Canada I saw represented in our fiction bore very little resemblance to the Canada I myself have experienced. How I might go about bridging that gap had already become my central preoccupation as a novelist and so Stephen’s declaration on page one of his introduction that “The writer emerges as an antagonist to or subtle dissenter from the surrounding society; she wants to write books that are missing from the catalogue of literature” was a more-than-welcome affirmation that such a thing might actually be possible. Central to Stephen’s critique of CanLit was that “the search for new forms, for a language capable of dramatizing our lives in our own voices, has lost its urgency” and he spends considerably time in subsequent chapters arguing that to invigorate CanLit with the requisite sense of urgency, Canadian novelists would be well-served by seeking inspiration from Latin American authors rather than from Americans or Brits, as is the fashion.
This sentiment would come to percolate in my thoughts with a mounting fervor akin to a revelatory, or perhaps more accurately, a revolutionary zeal while reading Chilean-Canadian writer Carmen Rodríguez’s masterful second novel, Atacama, a book which begins as a thoroughly compelling historical account of political oppression in her native Chile recounted through the alternating perspectives of Manuel — from a “working class” family of miners— and Lucía, the “bourgeois” daughter of a ruthless officer in the Chilean army, and ultimately ends as a definitive call to action urging us all, as the book’s final words do, to join in a united effort “to fight against the latest incarnation of capitalism: neoliberalism.”
The part of me which longs deeply for this book to find the success it deserves, hesitates to even mention the latter as such a bold declaration of an author’s ideological leanings will, undoubtedly, restrict its readership but then speaking of Atacama in any other context would, I fear, be both a disservice to the novel and to its author, who, after all, does set the stage by way of quoting Karl Marx. Mind you, it’s the novel’s third epigraph which I believe speaks most directly to its author’s intentions when she quotes Indian author Arundhati Roy writing, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”
In Atacama’s Chile of the 1920s, when the novel begins, the dream of another world is about as far removed from the reality of day to day life as we here in Canada are removed from, say, confronting our entrenched complicity in the climate emergency or, perhaps more pointedly, a genuine reckoning with the historical and ongoing genocide perpetrated against Indigenous Peoples. Now I can practically hear the hairs bristling amongst any number of our cultural curators at the mere suggestion that there is a correlation between the atrocities committed in a country such as Chile — during the 1920s nonetheless — and those committed by our own government — and lest we forget, our own citizenry — but having begun reading Atacama shortly after the bodies of over a thousand children where “discovered” in common burial pits on the grounds of former Residential Schools I’m finding it impossible not to see at least a few similarities.
Central to the novel’s narrative are two massacres orchestrated by Lucía’s father, Major Ernesto Céspedes. The first is in the mining village of La Coruña, where Manuel lives with his family. In the opening section, the miners go on strike to protest their abysmal working conditions and the Major’s reaction is swift and brutal. During the ensuing crackdown, Manuel’s younger sister is killed by a “stray” bullet and the scene is recounted with such a clear-eyed matter-of-factness that it reads almost like straight reportage, as does the scene where Manuel’s father is shot by firing squad.
The women began to wail and the men to roar. As the military man raised his arm, my papa shouted, “Viva el proletariado!” — “Long Live the Proletariat!” An indignant “Viva!” exploded from the crowd. For an instant, the army officer seemed to hesitate, but then he hollered “Fire!” at the top of his lungs.
The effect is suitably jarring for the reader and speaks to the author’s well-honed proclivity for rendering these horrors in plain language. It’s a technique well-suited to the task of imprinting them so indelibly in the reader’s mind though, after Manuel and the surviving members of his family are relocated to the coastal city of Iquique, I divined a somewhat deeper significance to the style after he uses an account of the massacre written as a school essay to get himself a job as a reporter for a local magazine. It’s also in Iquique that he’ll first encounter Lucía, who has been wrenched from the idyllic little world afforded to her in the mountain village of Tacna by her father’s status as a “national hero”, when a flood unearths thousands of bodies buried in a common burial pit and washes them downriver while Lucía is playing with friends on its shores. Lucía and her companions escape the deluge by climbing into a tree.
From the top of the jacaranda, we watched them go by. We saw heads, torsos, legs, hands sticking out of the jumble. One of those hands tapped the porcelain doll and for a short while continued to push it along before the vortex sucked it up. Once in a while, complete bodies emerged from the slush — bruised, swollen, mutilated, in rags, covered in mud.
The porcelain doll she accidentally dropped in the raging torrent is one that her father has given her. She will later learn it was actually taken from the hands of a young girl who was shot by her father’s men. Overhearing the soldiers laughing about it while she and her family are on the train bound for Iquique will be a watershed moment in Lucía’s young life (and it was while reading this section, in particular, that I found it impossible to ignore the corollary between Lucía’s warring confusion, horror, anger and sorrow at realizing her father was a monster and this country’s reaction to the bodies being unearthed at so many Residential Schools).
Remembering these atrocities will become an act of resistance for both Manuel and Lucía and it is a credit to the author’s skill as a novelist that much of the tension that will carry us towards Atacama’s climax is generated through the juxtaposition of the means by which they will allow this remembering to guide their vocations — Manuel as a journalist and Lucía as a dance instructor and choreographer.
Pressed for money to feed his family and knowing only that “I was a good reader and a good writer”, the thirteen-year-old Manuel approaches the editor of El Nortino regarding a job. The owner is suitably impressed by Manuel’s school composition about the massacre in La Coruña, though he cautions the boy that, “I couldn’t publish it now — the magazine would be shut down by the government and I would go to jail.” Still, he takes Manuel on, serving as a mentor for the aspiring journalist, and under his tutelage Manuel will become “an expert in circuitous ways to say what I wanted without betraying the truth or skirting the issues.” This will eventually lead him to cover the Spanish Civil War, a section which reads almost like an homage to Hemingway’s coverage of the same, buoyed by a love affair with a fellow journalist no less. It’s an experience which will have a dramatic influence on Manuel’s prospects as a writer, not for the least reason because it allows a friendship to blossom between himself and renowned, real-life Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.
You will ask what happened to the lilacs?
and the metaphysics wrapped in poppies?
and the rain that would often hammer his words
opening holes and filling them with birds.
“These were the first lines of I Explain A Few Things,” Manuel explains, “a poem in which Neruda recounts how the bloodbath he witnessed in Madrid at the beginning of the war led him to use poetry as a tool of denunciation and resistance.” But it would be the poem’s last lines which “had taken root in my mind.”
You will ask why his poetry
doesn’t speak of dreams, of leaves
and the great volcanoes in his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets, come and see
the blood in the streets
come and see the blood
in the streets.
It is hardly a coincidence then that it is a poet which inspires Manuel to write Nights and Days of War and Hope, his account of the war, and that it will eventually lead to a reunion between him and Lucía at a book signing (the power of art to inspire collective action is a central theme throughout the narrative). Buoyed by its success, Manuel tells Lucía that he next wants to write a book about her father to “Expose the bastard, let the world know that he is nothing more than a mass murderer at the service of the state and the bourgeoisie!” Lucía, who has since become estranged from her parents for the same reason, encourages him in this pursuit and is deeply troubled a short time later when Manuel seemingly disappears off the face of the earth. Six months later he shows up at Lucía's door and explains his absence this way:
Nights and Days of War and Hope was out in the world, and I felt completely empty…Spain, La Coruña, all my dead kept haunting me. I’d try to put them to rest by thinking of the future, but all I saw in front of me was a black cloud.
Ultimately, he finds solace by returning home to Iquique where “being with my people lifted my spirits” such that he’s ready again to mount the book about the monster Ernesto Céspedes.
Lucía’s journey towards a similarly creative endeavour begins at the opposite end of the spectrum, both in regards to her social status and the way it is framed. Where Manuel’s writing was always a means to inch closer and closer to the truth of what he witnessed, dance has primarily been a means of escape for the young Lucía. And no more so than when the ugly realities around her were beginning to ferment as in this scene where her nanny Mercedes, a Peruvian and “dark-skinned Quechua”, lets it slip that things are not nearly as tranquil in Tacna as they seem.
“Some terrible things are happening, my lovely. There are lots of rumours going around.”
“What terrible things?! What rumours?!” I asked. Mercedes took my face in her hands, smiled and looked me in the eye. “Nothing that my Lovely needs to worry about. Now let’s dance!”
The truly insidious nature of this scene is revealed after the flood, when Mercedes is fired for failing to spare young Lucía the horrors wrought by her own father, and it is only when she’s freed from the bondage of servitude that Mercedes feels free to speak her own mind on the matter:
“…as horrible as it was, you were meant to see what happened at the river, my Lovely,” she said. “Don’t forget what you saw. Don’t forget.”
Such is unlikely and, while remembering might indeed be a political act, Carmen spends much of remaining novel reminding the reader that mere remembering isn’t nearly enough. The pattern of using dance as a means of fleeing from the horror she witnessed continues to dominate her life as she becomes a dance instructor in Iquique and later when she is forced to go live with an aunt in Valparaiso after her father intercepts a letter she wrote to Manuel in which she tells him "about Tacna, the dead in the river, the flood, the train, my father, all of it." It is only after hearing of Manuel’s plans to write the book about her father that she’s able to...
...muster the courage to create Amarú, a ballet about the Tacna massacre. So, as I paced, sketched, took notes, listened to music, danced, relived the past, sat down to sketch some more and got up to dance again, I imagined Manuel going through his own version of the imaginative process.
A few paragraphs later, upon reading the first two chapters of Manuel’s book, Lucía reports:
He had gone for the personal approach and the story read as a mix of memoir, reportage, historical account, political essay and thriller. It was believable and it was touching.
Much the same could be said of Rodríguez’s approach to Atacama itself and reading the above passage I was again reminded of what Stephen Henighan wrote about the need “for new forms, for a language capable of dramatizing our lives in our own voices”, a sentiment which also forms the central thesis in literary critic Michael Gorra’s 2020 book The Saddest Words – William Faulkner’s Civil War. In it Gorra references Walt Whitman writing (in 1882) of how “neither fiction nor poetry had yet the capacity — the language — to deal honestly and openly with the human costs associated with the civil war”.
Reading that, at the very moment when the bodies of so many children were being unearthed in Kamloops, I couldn’t help but draw a clear parallel to our nation’s literature which has also failed, catastrophically, to create the capacity to deal honestly and openly with the human costs associated with our own war against Indigenous Peoples and Cultures as well as the deeply entrenched iniquities and outright violence rife all across the country for those of us consigned to the lower echelons. At root, these inequities are the direct result of the same “broader imaginative and cultural failure” which in The Great Derangement Amitav Ghosh suggests also “lies at the heart of the climate crisis” and Atacama’s most profound accomplishment is that it repositions the novel as the foremost means that we, as a society, have for not only remembering our past injustices so that they won’t be repeated but for the hollowing out of a space within which to foster the kinds of imaginative leaps that Manuel and Lucía were able to make to lift themselves out of the bloody morass which had previously defined them and their country.
In the so doing, Carmen Rodriguez has not only crafted a thoroughly enthralling work of fiction but also a veritable blueprint for how Canadian authors — from right across the cultural spectrum — might, at long last, go about imagining Arundhati Roy’s another world so that one day we all may be able to hear her breathing too.
I had oft-lamented that Canadian literature was lacking in something fundamental but didn’t possess the words to adequately articulate my rather inchoate misgivings beyond the increasingly aggrieved lament that the Canada I saw represented in our fiction bore very little resemblance to the Canada I myself have experienced. How I might go about bridging that gap had already become my central preoccupation as a novelist and so Stephen’s declaration on page one of his introduction that “The writer emerges as an antagonist to or subtle dissenter from the surrounding society; she wants to write books that are missing from the catalogue of literature” was a more-than-welcome affirmation that such a thing might actually be possible. Central to Stephen’s critique of CanLit was that “the search for new forms, for a language capable of dramatizing our lives in our own voices, has lost its urgency” and he spends considerably time in subsequent chapters arguing that to invigorate CanLit with the requisite sense of urgency, Canadian novelists would be well-served by seeking inspiration from Latin American authors rather than from Americans or Brits, as is the fashion.
This sentiment would come to percolate in my thoughts with a mounting fervor akin to a revelatory, or perhaps more accurately, a revolutionary zeal while reading Chilean-Canadian writer Carmen Rodríguez’s masterful second novel, Atacama, a book which begins as a thoroughly compelling historical account of political oppression in her native Chile recounted through the alternating perspectives of Manuel — from a “working class” family of miners— and Lucía, the “bourgeois” daughter of a ruthless officer in the Chilean army, and ultimately ends as a definitive call to action urging us all, as the book’s final words do, to join in a united effort “to fight against the latest incarnation of capitalism: neoliberalism.”
The part of me which longs deeply for this book to find the success it deserves, hesitates to even mention the latter as such a bold declaration of an author’s ideological leanings will, undoubtedly, restrict its readership but then speaking of Atacama in any other context would, I fear, be both a disservice to the novel and to its author, who, after all, does set the stage by way of quoting Karl Marx. Mind you, it’s the novel’s third epigraph which I believe speaks most directly to its author’s intentions when she quotes Indian author Arundhati Roy writing, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.”
In Atacama’s Chile of the 1920s, when the novel begins, the dream of another world is about as far removed from the reality of day to day life as we here in Canada are removed from, say, confronting our entrenched complicity in the climate emergency or, perhaps more pointedly, a genuine reckoning with the historical and ongoing genocide perpetrated against Indigenous Peoples. Now I can practically hear the hairs bristling amongst any number of our cultural curators at the mere suggestion that there is a correlation between the atrocities committed in a country such as Chile — during the 1920s nonetheless — and those committed by our own government — and lest we forget, our own citizenry — but having begun reading Atacama shortly after the bodies of over a thousand children where “discovered” in common burial pits on the grounds of former Residential Schools I’m finding it impossible not to see at least a few similarities.
Central to the novel’s narrative are two massacres orchestrated by Lucía’s father, Major Ernesto Céspedes. The first is in the mining village of La Coruña, where Manuel lives with his family. In the opening section, the miners go on strike to protest their abysmal working conditions and the Major’s reaction is swift and brutal. During the ensuing crackdown, Manuel’s younger sister is killed by a “stray” bullet and the scene is recounted with such a clear-eyed matter-of-factness that it reads almost like straight reportage, as does the scene where Manuel’s father is shot by firing squad.
The women began to wail and the men to roar. As the military man raised his arm, my papa shouted, “Viva el proletariado!” — “Long Live the Proletariat!” An indignant “Viva!” exploded from the crowd. For an instant, the army officer seemed to hesitate, but then he hollered “Fire!” at the top of his lungs.
The effect is suitably jarring for the reader and speaks to the author’s well-honed proclivity for rendering these horrors in plain language. It’s a technique well-suited to the task of imprinting them so indelibly in the reader’s mind though, after Manuel and the surviving members of his family are relocated to the coastal city of Iquique, I divined a somewhat deeper significance to the style after he uses an account of the massacre written as a school essay to get himself a job as a reporter for a local magazine. It’s also in Iquique that he’ll first encounter Lucía, who has been wrenched from the idyllic little world afforded to her in the mountain village of Tacna by her father’s status as a “national hero”, when a flood unearths thousands of bodies buried in a common burial pit and washes them downriver while Lucía is playing with friends on its shores. Lucía and her companions escape the deluge by climbing into a tree.
From the top of the jacaranda, we watched them go by. We saw heads, torsos, legs, hands sticking out of the jumble. One of those hands tapped the porcelain doll and for a short while continued to push it along before the vortex sucked it up. Once in a while, complete bodies emerged from the slush — bruised, swollen, mutilated, in rags, covered in mud.
The porcelain doll she accidentally dropped in the raging torrent is one that her father has given her. She will later learn it was actually taken from the hands of a young girl who was shot by her father’s men. Overhearing the soldiers laughing about it while she and her family are on the train bound for Iquique will be a watershed moment in Lucía’s young life (and it was while reading this section, in particular, that I found it impossible to ignore the corollary between Lucía’s warring confusion, horror, anger and sorrow at realizing her father was a monster and this country’s reaction to the bodies being unearthed at so many Residential Schools).
Remembering these atrocities will become an act of resistance for both Manuel and Lucía and it is a credit to the author’s skill as a novelist that much of the tension that will carry us towards Atacama’s climax is generated through the juxtaposition of the means by which they will allow this remembering to guide their vocations — Manuel as a journalist and Lucía as a dance instructor and choreographer.
Pressed for money to feed his family and knowing only that “I was a good reader and a good writer”, the thirteen-year-old Manuel approaches the editor of El Nortino regarding a job. The owner is suitably impressed by Manuel’s school composition about the massacre in La Coruña, though he cautions the boy that, “I couldn’t publish it now — the magazine would be shut down by the government and I would go to jail.” Still, he takes Manuel on, serving as a mentor for the aspiring journalist, and under his tutelage Manuel will become “an expert in circuitous ways to say what I wanted without betraying the truth or skirting the issues.” This will eventually lead him to cover the Spanish Civil War, a section which reads almost like an homage to Hemingway’s coverage of the same, buoyed by a love affair with a fellow journalist no less. It’s an experience which will have a dramatic influence on Manuel’s prospects as a writer, not for the least reason because it allows a friendship to blossom between himself and renowned, real-life Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.
You will ask what happened to the lilacs?
and the metaphysics wrapped in poppies?
and the rain that would often hammer his words
opening holes and filling them with birds.
“These were the first lines of I Explain A Few Things,” Manuel explains, “a poem in which Neruda recounts how the bloodbath he witnessed in Madrid at the beginning of the war led him to use poetry as a tool of denunciation and resistance.” But it would be the poem’s last lines which “had taken root in my mind.”
You will ask why his poetry
doesn’t speak of dreams, of leaves
and the great volcanoes in his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets, come and see
the blood in the streets
come and see the blood
in the streets.
It is hardly a coincidence then that it is a poet which inspires Manuel to write Nights and Days of War and Hope, his account of the war, and that it will eventually lead to a reunion between him and Lucía at a book signing (the power of art to inspire collective action is a central theme throughout the narrative). Buoyed by its success, Manuel tells Lucía that he next wants to write a book about her father to “Expose the bastard, let the world know that he is nothing more than a mass murderer at the service of the state and the bourgeoisie!” Lucía, who has since become estranged from her parents for the same reason, encourages him in this pursuit and is deeply troubled a short time later when Manuel seemingly disappears off the face of the earth. Six months later he shows up at Lucía's door and explains his absence this way:
Nights and Days of War and Hope was out in the world, and I felt completely empty…Spain, La Coruña, all my dead kept haunting me. I’d try to put them to rest by thinking of the future, but all I saw in front of me was a black cloud.
Ultimately, he finds solace by returning home to Iquique where “being with my people lifted my spirits” such that he’s ready again to mount the book about the monster Ernesto Céspedes.
Lucía’s journey towards a similarly creative endeavour begins at the opposite end of the spectrum, both in regards to her social status and the way it is framed. Where Manuel’s writing was always a means to inch closer and closer to the truth of what he witnessed, dance has primarily been a means of escape for the young Lucía. And no more so than when the ugly realities around her were beginning to ferment as in this scene where her nanny Mercedes, a Peruvian and “dark-skinned Quechua”, lets it slip that things are not nearly as tranquil in Tacna as they seem.
“Some terrible things are happening, my lovely. There are lots of rumours going around.”
“What terrible things?! What rumours?!” I asked. Mercedes took my face in her hands, smiled and looked me in the eye. “Nothing that my Lovely needs to worry about. Now let’s dance!”
The truly insidious nature of this scene is revealed after the flood, when Mercedes is fired for failing to spare young Lucía the horrors wrought by her own father, and it is only when she’s freed from the bondage of servitude that Mercedes feels free to speak her own mind on the matter:
“…as horrible as it was, you were meant to see what happened at the river, my Lovely,” she said. “Don’t forget what you saw. Don’t forget.”
Such is unlikely and, while remembering might indeed be a political act, Carmen spends much of remaining novel reminding the reader that mere remembering isn’t nearly enough. The pattern of using dance as a means of fleeing from the horror she witnessed continues to dominate her life as she becomes a dance instructor in Iquique and later when she is forced to go live with an aunt in Valparaiso after her father intercepts a letter she wrote to Manuel in which she tells him "about Tacna, the dead in the river, the flood, the train, my father, all of it." It is only after hearing of Manuel’s plans to write the book about her father that she’s able to...
...muster the courage to create Amarú, a ballet about the Tacna massacre. So, as I paced, sketched, took notes, listened to music, danced, relived the past, sat down to sketch some more and got up to dance again, I imagined Manuel going through his own version of the imaginative process.
A few paragraphs later, upon reading the first two chapters of Manuel’s book, Lucía reports:
He had gone for the personal approach and the story read as a mix of memoir, reportage, historical account, political essay and thriller. It was believable and it was touching.
Much the same could be said of Rodríguez’s approach to Atacama itself and reading the above passage I was again reminded of what Stephen Henighan wrote about the need “for new forms, for a language capable of dramatizing our lives in our own voices”, a sentiment which also forms the central thesis in literary critic Michael Gorra’s 2020 book The Saddest Words – William Faulkner’s Civil War. In it Gorra references Walt Whitman writing (in 1882) of how “neither fiction nor poetry had yet the capacity — the language — to deal honestly and openly with the human costs associated with the civil war”.
Reading that, at the very moment when the bodies of so many children were being unearthed in Kamloops, I couldn’t help but draw a clear parallel to our nation’s literature which has also failed, catastrophically, to create the capacity to deal honestly and openly with the human costs associated with our own war against Indigenous Peoples and Cultures as well as the deeply entrenched iniquities and outright violence rife all across the country for those of us consigned to the lower echelons. At root, these inequities are the direct result of the same “broader imaginative and cultural failure” which in The Great Derangement Amitav Ghosh suggests also “lies at the heart of the climate crisis” and Atacama’s most profound accomplishment is that it repositions the novel as the foremost means that we, as a society, have for not only remembering our past injustices so that they won’t be repeated but for the hollowing out of a space within which to foster the kinds of imaginative leaps that Manuel and Lucía were able to make to lift themselves out of the bloody morass which had previously defined them and their country.
In the so doing, Carmen Rodriguez has not only crafted a thoroughly enthralling work of fiction but also a veritable blueprint for how Canadian authors — from right across the cultural spectrum — might, at long last, go about imagining Arundhati Roy’s another world so that one day we all may be able to hear her breathing too.
December 21, 2021
“Atacama is an important witness to history, an homage to the people of Chile, Peru, Spain, and all oppressed citizens anywhere in the world.”
"In the Afterword of Atacama, author Carmen Rodriguez talks about the genesis of her novel: a deathbed confession made by her own mother. Rodriguez recreates this last secret story as a pivotal experience around which the novel revolves: a brutal vision of floods and stench, dead bodies of murdered citizens of Tacna, Peru, in April, 1925. What Rodriguez’s mother saw, which haunted her all her life, were the bodies of citizens who were eliminated because the government didn’t want their voices—or their votes to be heard. They murdered them because they feared these citizens would vote them out of office. Murdered into silence. Just one of the many examples of oppression that citizens of the working class endured in Chile and Peru from 1925–1949—the bookend years of Rodriquez’s novel." - excerpted from my review of ATACAMA on New York Journal of Books
"In the Afterword of Atacama, author Carmen Rodriguez talks about the genesis of her novel: a deathbed confession made by her own mother. Rodriguez recreates this last secret story as a pivotal experience around which the novel revolves: a brutal vision of floods and stench, dead bodies of murdered citizens of Tacna, Peru, in April, 1925. What Rodriguez’s mother saw, which haunted her all her life, were the bodies of citizens who were eliminated because the government didn’t want their voices—or their votes to be heard. They murdered them because they feared these citizens would vote them out of office. Murdered into silence. Just one of the many examples of oppression that citizens of the working class endured in Chile and Peru from 1925–1949—the bookend years of Rodriquez’s novel." - excerpted from my review of ATACAMA on New York Journal of Books
September 5, 2023
Es una obra bien escrita, bien documentada en cuanto a la parte histórica. Sin embargo, al argumento le faltó algo más enganchador. Se supone que hay una pareja, pero no es la típica historia de amor. Aunque los personajes están bien construidos, no logré simpatizar con ellos.
Resalto la buena narración.
Resalto la buena narración.
November 25, 2021
A sad and powerful telling of two lives in turbulent times, from anarchist and communist organizers brutally murdered by fascist militia, to the Spanish Civil war, and Chile's descent into fascist dictatorship.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews