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No Stars in the Sky
A new collection of hard-hitting and intimate stories by award-winning Mexican Canadian author Martha Bátiz.
The nineteen stories in No Stars in the Sky feature strong but damaged female characters in crisis. Tormented by personal conflicts and oppressive regimes that treat the female body like a trophy of war, the women in No Stars in the Sky face life-altering circumstances that either shatter or make them stronger, albeit at a very high price. True to her Latin American roots, Bátiz shines a light on the crises that concern her most: the plight of migrant children along the Mexico–U.S. border, the tragedy of the disappeared in Mexico and Argentina, and the generalized racial and domestic violence that has turned life into a constant struggle for survival. With an unflinching hand, Bátiz explores the breadth of the human condition to expose silent tragedies too often ignored.
The nineteen stories in No Stars in the Sky feature strong but damaged female characters in crisis. Tormented by personal conflicts and oppressive regimes that treat the female body like a trophy of war, the women in No Stars in the Sky face life-altering circumstances that either shatter or make them stronger, albeit at a very high price. True to her Latin American roots, Bátiz shines a light on the crises that concern her most: the plight of migrant children along the Mexico–U.S. border, the tragedy of the disappeared in Mexico and Argentina, and the generalized racial and domestic violence that has turned life into a constant struggle for survival. With an unflinching hand, Bátiz explores the breadth of the human condition to expose silent tragedies too often ignored.
258 pages, Paperback
Published May 3, 2022
6 people are currently reading
116 people want to read
About the author
Martha Batiz
18 books51 followersMartha Batiz was born and raised in Mexico City, but has been living in Toronto since 2003. She started publishing in 1993 at age 22. Her articles, chronicles, reviews and short stories have appeared in diverse newspapers and magazines not only in her homeland, but also in Spain, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Peru, Ireland, England, the United States, Australia, and Canada. Her first book was a short-story collection called A todos los voy a matar (I’m Going To Kill Them All, Castillo Press, 2000). Her award-winning novella The Wolf’s Mouth/ Damiana's Reprieve (Exile Editions, 2009 and 2018, respectively) was originally published in Spanish both in the Dominican Republic and in Mexico (Boca de lobo, in 2007 and 2008, respectively), and is available on Audible in Spanish since 2021. The Wolf's Mouth/Damiana's Reprieve is available in French as La Gueule du Loup since 2018. A second short-story collection titled De tránsito (In Transit) was published in 2014 in Puerto Rico by Terranova Editores, and received an honorary mention in the International Latino Book Awards in San Francisco in 2015. Martha went on to win the First Place in the International Latino Book Awards in 2018 for her first short-story collection in English, Plaza Requiem: Stories at the Edge of Ordinary Lives (Exile Editions, 2017). Her most recent book is another short-story collection titled No Stars in the Sky (House of Anansi Press, 2022). Her debut novel, A Daughter's Place, in which she explores the lives of the daughter, niece, sisters, and wife of celebrated Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes, will be released on May 20, 2025, by House of Anansi Press.
Martha holds a PhD in Latin American Literature and is an ATA-certified literary translator. Besides being the founder and instructor of the Creative Writing in Spanish course currently offered by the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto, she is a part-time Professor at York University/Glendon College, where she teaches Spanish literature and language, and Literary Translation. In 2014, Martha was featured in Latinos Magazine among the Top Ten Most Successful Mexicans in Canada. In 2015, she was chosen as one of the Top Ten Most Influential Hispanic-Canadians. Martha's work has been widely anthologized in Mexico and within the Hispanic-Canadian community in Canada. She was part of the editorial committee of the very successful anthology Historias de Toronto (Toronto Stories. Lugar Comun, Ottawa, 2016).
Martha holds a PhD in Latin American Literature and is an ATA-certified literary translator. Besides being the founder and instructor of the Creative Writing in Spanish course currently offered by the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto, she is a part-time Professor at York University/Glendon College, where she teaches Spanish literature and language, and Literary Translation. In 2014, Martha was featured in Latinos Magazine among the Top Ten Most Successful Mexicans in Canada. In 2015, she was chosen as one of the Top Ten Most Influential Hispanic-Canadians. Martha's work has been widely anthologized in Mexico and within the Hispanic-Canadian community in Canada. She was part of the editorial committee of the very successful anthology Historias de Toronto (Toronto Stories. Lugar Comun, Ottawa, 2016).
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 27, 2022
If this collection isn't on the 2022 Giller Longlist in September I will be bitterly, bitterly disappointed. A fantastic collection of stories.
April 30, 2022
Please Note: I received an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This did not influence the opinions in my review in any way.
This is a collection of short stories featuring women who are facing terrible realities. The author, Martha Batiz, is able to set the scene quickly, letting the reader understand the main character's situation and dilemma. I found these stories hard to read, at times, but very moving. Sadly, as harrowing as these vignettes are, I can see nearly all of these stories as actually happening.
What I Liked:
Themes:
Most of the stories show conflicts between mothers and daughters. No matter how the state of their relationships are, there are undeniable bonds between women and their mothers. And there are plenty of messed up relationships in these stories. I think women and girls (and those identifying as women) are easily influenced by their mothers. Sometimes the message a mother sends to her daughter is that she isn't valued. Other times, mothers let their daughters know that, since the mom is in a bad situation, the daughter needs to put up, and shut up. I hated those messages, but found them to be true to life.
But other stories show how fiercely protective mothers and daughters are of each other. Even if their relationships are strained, mothers never stop being worried for their daughters. And daughters will always be tied to the person who gave birth to them.
Characters:
There are a variety of characters in these stories, and the author did a wonderful job of making them whole people in a short time. Even in a short story, these characters face challenges and are changed by them through the course of the story. Some characters are hopeful, and then lose their optimism, but others become stronger as a result of what happens to them. I enjoyed those characters the most.
Trigger Warning for rape and domestic violence:
This is not an idle warning. These stories are sometimes difficult to consume. I had to stop several times and process the harshness of the storylines. But these stories are so moving that I was glad I stuck with it.
This is a collection of short stories featuring women who are facing terrible realities. The author, Martha Batiz, is able to set the scene quickly, letting the reader understand the main character's situation and dilemma. I found these stories hard to read, at times, but very moving. Sadly, as harrowing as these vignettes are, I can see nearly all of these stories as actually happening.
What I Liked:
Themes:
Most of the stories show conflicts between mothers and daughters. No matter how the state of their relationships are, there are undeniable bonds between women and their mothers. And there are plenty of messed up relationships in these stories. I think women and girls (and those identifying as women) are easily influenced by their mothers. Sometimes the message a mother sends to her daughter is that she isn't valued. Other times, mothers let their daughters know that, since the mom is in a bad situation, the daughter needs to put up, and shut up. I hated those messages, but found them to be true to life.
But other stories show how fiercely protective mothers and daughters are of each other. Even if their relationships are strained, mothers never stop being worried for their daughters. And daughters will always be tied to the person who gave birth to them.
Characters:
There are a variety of characters in these stories, and the author did a wonderful job of making them whole people in a short time. Even in a short story, these characters face challenges and are changed by them through the course of the story. Some characters are hopeful, and then lose their optimism, but others become stronger as a result of what happens to them. I enjoyed those characters the most.
Trigger Warning for rape and domestic violence:
This is not an idle warning. These stories are sometimes difficult to consume. I had to stop several times and process the harshness of the storylines. But these stories are so moving that I was glad I stuck with it.
July 2, 2022
NO STARS IN THE SKY by Martha Bátiz is a great short story collection! I was so eager to read this book since I love CanLit short stories. I really appreciated the author’s letter to the reader at the beginning that informs there will be some painful and disturbing content. I definitely found some of the stories difficult and read these stories slowly over a couple weeks. The opening story Jason is about a mother dealing with the loss of her child which is very emotional. These 19 stories focus on women and specifically Latin American women dealing with hardships of immigration, racism and plain survival. I really enjoyed the duality of the Mexican and Canadian settings. My fave stories are Dear Abuela and The First Piano. Dear Abuela is an epistolary story of a women’s journey from Mexico City to Toronto and very sad. The First Piano is dedicated to the author’s mother and is about a young pianist, Cristina, who gives a concert in a small town. I loved the realism in this story. I loved the strong theme of women in this book. I’m so happy I got to read this collection!
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Thank you to the author for my signed gifted copy!
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Thank you to the author for my signed gifted copy!
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May 7, 2022No Stars in the Sky, short fiction by Martha Batiz, House of Anansi, 2022
Influenza means "influenced by stars". In her plague collection, Martha Batiz navigates this darkness with the strength of a woman writing with her own blood, her ink spilling the music of time into the space between galaxies.
Pandemic is a unique time to be a writer. We inevitably think of Boccaccio holed up in his safe house in the countryside writing plague stories that eventually became the classic Decameron or Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, stories about the persistence of love.
Batiz, who is a master dramaturge, captures cries from lips in lockdown, the stories of women rolled up in her own passionate narrative, a woman's life. No Stars in the Sky is a collection of inverted love stories told by a writer who knows the visceral pain of paradox in the cycle of birth, reproduction and death, violence, violence, violence.
Just like the character who throttles her mentor, she goes for the throat from the very first line of a story we might prefer to forget, a mother's deranged grief. The title character, Jason, he of the fleece, is a future king transformed by hubris, a deadly pill. The narrator, a bereaved mother with no proper noun for what she has become, tells her story of loss, the day the world cracked open and swallowed her life with no possibility of redemption.
Lest we think her tragedy is unique, Batiz returns to the classical themes that remind us all stories are variations on twelve notes, seven deadly sins and a reduced handful of antidotes, mother's little helpers: humour, grace, forgiveness and pragmatism.
We learn in later classical resonance, the ultimate story, that Jason was destined for tragedy. Children carry the burden of their names, but but this distraught woman has none.
There are nouns for widows, divorcees and wives, but nothing for grieving mothers who suffer the phantom pain of children still moving inside maternal ecosystems. She who grieves self-mutilates, wishing her body were covered in thorns that might make her stronger. There is no protection for losing flesh of your flesh, no armour, not even a name to give it a shape to reject. Remember this image, she shouts on the page. It will recur in the bruised and aching arms of every mother denied her apotheosis.
'I remembers Jason talking about crabs. How they outgrow their shells and shed them.' Jason is free of the wound of being a child in a society indifferent to difference. He left his shell behind and that shell is a woman with no identity, clinging to the smells that identify her motherhood.
Scent is the sense that ties mother to child, the way ewes identify their lambs in the flock. Batiz's images are a sensory catalogue that reference the recurring smells that guide us to attraction and revulsion, the smells of life and death, garbage and flowers as her characters, seeking light, smell their way to memory, the recollection of perfume, bedding, abandoned dolls and teddy bears. The author is a bloodhound tracking lineage, following the scent to family archetypes in the deep forest of loss.
Leonard Cohen wrote the line, "There ain't no cure for love." Fear comes from love, potential loss. "Jason" is not a true story. None of the narratives are fiction or non-fiction. All are true. All have the odour of real time in lost time, a system of archetypes, one story. In "The Raincoat" Batiz suits up the metaphor for protection in a world where the plague is everywhere and its' name is anxiety. There is no permanent antidote, not power, not money, not even a yellow raincoat can protect her characters from the awful unknown; so what is the cure for love, referred pain?
Her characters seek anodyne. Some mourners cover their mirrors, some break the glass. In "Broken," a pastiche of fragmented time, one mother examines the shattered image of her missing daughter, Alma (Soul), piece by piece: Before. After. During. Her goal is to witness, assemble the shards and make sure her story is told when the lost so often become invisible. She will find the star that illuminates her personal universe, even in rear view mirrors broken in the inevitable accidents of human existence.
Old wounds resonate on this journey, meditations made possible by isolation in the time of pandemic, as the pulse on the road to recovery through examination. There is forgiveness in Batiz's rearrangement of fatal splinters, but no justification for human weakness and cruelty. It simply is. Stars are sharp but discovered, they illuminate.
Because these injuries affect women internally, in the sacred life giving spaces, the bleeding never stops. Even the apparently insignificant judgements of a vain mother conditioned by patriarchal standards of beauty live inside the woman who eventually gives birth to death. She is never enough, even when she is more, but she does persevere.
Stories of the Disappearing, her own political experience, mark these bloodstained pages, as loved ones, friends, parents, children vanish into yawning holes to become compost for richly textured accounts of life on and in Earth. It is relentless. To love is to lose, but, we are reminded, to earn opportunities for redemption, new life, in many cases the Promised Land known as Toronto.
"Silence is the one thing I don't fear" the omniscient narrator declares. That is where she can select the voices she wants to project, "…her cry among the symphony of wails that hang in the air like icycles about to break."
One thousand lives inhabited Uncle Koe's memory and imagination as he endured the punishment of isolation for being a poet, the first to be sacrificed under tyranny.
"Fiat voluntas Dei", God the man is no help. The patriarchy betrays women and children in the name of unreasoning power, "that of which," in the words of Saint Anselm, "we can conceive nothing greater" is rebutted by a scalding cup of coffee thrown by a righteously angry woman.
Batiz's characters are furious idealists betrayed by the forces that undermine genuine love when they adhere to dogma created by compromise, an unambiguous status quo. The infrastructure of cant holds techtonic plates in untenable rigidity and something has to give. Every story in this collection is an earth tremour, its seismic information divulged by a courageous woman.
"Dear Abuela," begins one catalogue of grief that explains the function of matriarchy.
"Abuela, you used to say that history is round, that's why it repeats itself." Like the Ancient Mariner, grandmothers keep repeating their stories, lest we forget, and granddaughters wonder who will be "patient enough to follow the sorrow that dripped from my pen onto this letter."
"Nothing's crueler than hope." One grandmother pitches the ambiguous key where angels, small children and dogs with painful ears adapt to the score. We are given twelve notes and the distance between stars in which to improvise the narratives of discord and harmony. Martha Batiz knows this. The lights go on and off but they are always there, a virtual piano, one Auntie's coffin burning like a Viking funeral boat.
But then there is the exquisite beauty of her mother's recital, in a mountain town almost inaccessible for performance, for parishioners who bring their own best chairs to a church potentially desecrated by generations of ecclesiastical sin to have their souls lifted by music.
And as always, redemption is children playing on the black keys, falling into the petit mort, a grand silence where love considers the next variation on a common theme.
Influenza means "influenced by stars". In her plague collection, Martha Batiz navigates this darkness with the strength of a woman writing with her own blood, her ink spilling the music of time into the space between galaxies.
Pandemic is a unique time to be a writer. We inevitably think of Boccaccio holed up in his safe house in the countryside writing plague stories that eventually became the classic Decameron or Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, stories about the persistence of love.
Batiz, who is a master dramaturge, captures cries from lips in lockdown, the stories of women rolled up in her own passionate narrative, a woman's life. No Stars in the Sky is a collection of inverted love stories told by a writer who knows the visceral pain of paradox in the cycle of birth, reproduction and death, violence, violence, violence.
Just like the character who throttles her mentor, she goes for the throat from the very first line of a story we might prefer to forget, a mother's deranged grief. The title character, Jason, he of the fleece, is a future king transformed by hubris, a deadly pill. The narrator, a bereaved mother with no proper noun for what she has become, tells her story of loss, the day the world cracked open and swallowed her life with no possibility of redemption.
Lest we think her tragedy is unique, Batiz returns to the classical themes that remind us all stories are variations on twelve notes, seven deadly sins and a reduced handful of antidotes, mother's little helpers: humour, grace, forgiveness and pragmatism.
We learn in later classical resonance, the ultimate story, that Jason was destined for tragedy. Children carry the burden of their names, but but this distraught woman has none.
There are nouns for widows, divorcees and wives, but nothing for grieving mothers who suffer the phantom pain of children still moving inside maternal ecosystems. She who grieves self-mutilates, wishing her body were covered in thorns that might make her stronger. There is no protection for losing flesh of your flesh, no armour, not even a name to give it a shape to reject. Remember this image, she shouts on the page. It will recur in the bruised and aching arms of every mother denied her apotheosis.
'I remembers Jason talking about crabs. How they outgrow their shells and shed them.' Jason is free of the wound of being a child in a society indifferent to difference. He left his shell behind and that shell is a woman with no identity, clinging to the smells that identify her motherhood.
Scent is the sense that ties mother to child, the way ewes identify their lambs in the flock. Batiz's images are a sensory catalogue that reference the recurring smells that guide us to attraction and revulsion, the smells of life and death, garbage and flowers as her characters, seeking light, smell their way to memory, the recollection of perfume, bedding, abandoned dolls and teddy bears. The author is a bloodhound tracking lineage, following the scent to family archetypes in the deep forest of loss.
Leonard Cohen wrote the line, "There ain't no cure for love." Fear comes from love, potential loss. "Jason" is not a true story. None of the narratives are fiction or non-fiction. All are true. All have the odour of real time in lost time, a system of archetypes, one story. In "The Raincoat" Batiz suits up the metaphor for protection in a world where the plague is everywhere and its' name is anxiety. There is no permanent antidote, not power, not money, not even a yellow raincoat can protect her characters from the awful unknown; so what is the cure for love, referred pain?
Her characters seek anodyne. Some mourners cover their mirrors, some break the glass. In "Broken," a pastiche of fragmented time, one mother examines the shattered image of her missing daughter, Alma (Soul), piece by piece: Before. After. During. Her goal is to witness, assemble the shards and make sure her story is told when the lost so often become invisible. She will find the star that illuminates her personal universe, even in rear view mirrors broken in the inevitable accidents of human existence.
Old wounds resonate on this journey, meditations made possible by isolation in the time of pandemic, as the pulse on the road to recovery through examination. There is forgiveness in Batiz's rearrangement of fatal splinters, but no justification for human weakness and cruelty. It simply is. Stars are sharp but discovered, they illuminate.
Because these injuries affect women internally, in the sacred life giving spaces, the bleeding never stops. Even the apparently insignificant judgements of a vain mother conditioned by patriarchal standards of beauty live inside the woman who eventually gives birth to death. She is never enough, even when she is more, but she does persevere.
Stories of the Disappearing, her own political experience, mark these bloodstained pages, as loved ones, friends, parents, children vanish into yawning holes to become compost for richly textured accounts of life on and in Earth. It is relentless. To love is to lose, but, we are reminded, to earn opportunities for redemption, new life, in many cases the Promised Land known as Toronto.
"Silence is the one thing I don't fear" the omniscient narrator declares. That is where she can select the voices she wants to project, "…her cry among the symphony of wails that hang in the air like icycles about to break."
One thousand lives inhabited Uncle Koe's memory and imagination as he endured the punishment of isolation for being a poet, the first to be sacrificed under tyranny.
"Fiat voluntas Dei", God the man is no help. The patriarchy betrays women and children in the name of unreasoning power, "that of which," in the words of Saint Anselm, "we can conceive nothing greater" is rebutted by a scalding cup of coffee thrown by a righteously angry woman.
Batiz's characters are furious idealists betrayed by the forces that undermine genuine love when they adhere to dogma created by compromise, an unambiguous status quo. The infrastructure of cant holds techtonic plates in untenable rigidity and something has to give. Every story in this collection is an earth tremour, its seismic information divulged by a courageous woman.
"Dear Abuela," begins one catalogue of grief that explains the function of matriarchy.
"Abuela, you used to say that history is round, that's why it repeats itself." Like the Ancient Mariner, grandmothers keep repeating their stories, lest we forget, and granddaughters wonder who will be "patient enough to follow the sorrow that dripped from my pen onto this letter."
"Nothing's crueler than hope." One grandmother pitches the ambiguous key where angels, small children and dogs with painful ears adapt to the score. We are given twelve notes and the distance between stars in which to improvise the narratives of discord and harmony. Martha Batiz knows this. The lights go on and off but they are always there, a virtual piano, one Auntie's coffin burning like a Viking funeral boat.
But then there is the exquisite beauty of her mother's recital, in a mountain town almost inaccessible for performance, for parishioners who bring their own best chairs to a church potentially desecrated by generations of ecclesiastical sin to have their souls lifted by music.
And as always, redemption is children playing on the black keys, falling into the petit mort, a grand silence where love considers the next variation on a common theme.
April 30, 2023
Excellent collection of short stories with beautiful writing-- a prime example of showing not telling. This collection was engaging and felt like a punch to the gut. My personal favourite story had to be Apartment 91B from which the title derives itself. This story had everything, extremely relatable for any immigrant or child of immigrants who fled a country with an oppressive and corrupt regime in search of something better. It masterfully demonstrates the tug of war between the identity and connection one feels to their cultural heritage and home country and the difficult reality that that country is full of painful memories and not a place one can live in let alone thrive in. Recognizing and being grateful to the country you're in yet still wanting to go back to discover your roots, despite the danger. It is a story of the nuances of familial dynamics and history-- all rolled into a mere 14 pages. I absolutely loved it (and it emotionally destroyed me)!
January 25, 2022
I was so lucky to be given an advanced copy of this incredible collection! Profoundly moving and beautifully written, Martha Batiz’s NO STARS IN THE SKY is a collection of stories that spans different countries and timelines but always circles back to keen observances of the human experience. With a writing style so gorgeous and spare, Batiz has a remarkable capacity to draw out moments both significant and small, to find the deepest meaning in little snippets of time. Each story is its own universe that transports the reader through the characters’ joy and pain, turmoil and resilience, from the hills of inland Mexico to the streetcars of Toronto and beyond. A remarkably brilliant collection.
January 25, 2022
Martha Bátiz is a master of the short story and with 'No Stars in the Sky' has crafted a haunting collection of stories that will leave you breathless. Brimming with unforgettable characters who find themselves in unimaginable circumstances 'No Stars in the Sky' shines with brilliance. Bátiz’s prose sparkles against the dark background of heartbreaking choices and harsh realities, and lights up the senses. This book is meant to be read slowly and savoured. There are sure to be many five star ratings for this book which will ensure the sky is soon filled with every constellation.
April 9, 2022
A life changing book. Martha Batiz has the rare gift of sharing the stories of women who have been through unspeakable tragedy and cruelty while weaving each one into a beautiful masterpiece. This collection of short stories will break your heart and haunt you long after you have finished reading. Batiz makes us feel as if we know each character intimately and helps us come face to face with devastating situations in our world. A must read.
May 9, 2022
I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
A collection of stories featuring women and their struggles to survive tragic circumstances, and ultimately coming out of them stronger. Excellent writing and a recommended read.
A collection of stories featuring women and their struggles to survive tragic circumstances, and ultimately coming out of them stronger. Excellent writing and a recommended read.
July 1, 2022
A short and devastating read. The writing is first class, but the stories are all relentlessly bleak and depressing. This is a short story collection where I admire the power of the concise storytelling skill...but I think I need to do something happy for myself at this moment.
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October 17, 2022In the story "The First Piano" Father Domingo arranges for a piano and a pianist to arrive at his isolated parish, an arduous and dangerous journey. The old benches are pushed aside and everyone brings a best chair to the concert. Readers of short story collections must also bring their best chairs
to better appreciate moving performances.
to better appreciate moving performances.
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May 22, 2022Review forthcoming in Literal Magazine.
July 6, 2022
This book is a must-read. The stories here are heartbreaking and beautifully written. By far the best collection of short stories I've read in a while.
July 22, 2024
This was such a stellar collection of short stories! The voices of the different characters were amazing, and the stories were filled with so much heart and hurt, and the mythological references! I adored this; I'll definitely be reading more of Batiz works!
August 20, 2023
In No Stars in the Sky, her searing debut collection of short fiction, Martha Bátiz writes persuasively about loss and displacement, the fear of not knowing what’s around the next corner or who to trust, the tragedy of innocent lives lost to cruelty and corruption. Her characters are women wounded by circumstance, who have survived life-altering trauma, who have been victimized and violated. “Jason” chronicles the debilitating and inconsolable grief of a woman in the aftermath of her teenage son’s suicide, an event for which she feels responsible but which in her heart she knows was beyond her to prevent. The slightly unhinged narrator of “The Raincoat,” a Mexican immigrant living in Toronto, wears a yellow raincoat whenever she leaves her apartment to protect herself from bedbugs, a pervasive affliction in the city which she calls “the plague” and which has become an obsession. The narrator of “The General’s Daughter” recalls events from her childhood, growing up in the household of a powerful member of an authoritarian regime. It is the only life she knows, and so she enjoys and even boasts about the privilege her father’s position grants her. But such a childhood is a double-edged sword, which she discovers when she learns the truth behind her best friend’s disappearance. The stories are most effective when Bátiz writes from the perspective of the regime’s victims. “Apartment 91B” is narrated by a female academic who has fled her home in Argentina after accepting a teaching position in Arizona. “Teaching Russian literature wasn’t supposed to be dangerous,” she states. “But it was.” In raw terms she recalls her 5-year incarceration at the hands of the Junta, the beatings and torture that have marked her, and the disappearance of her husband, Ernesto, also an academic. But even after having found refuge abroad, new grief is forced upon her when her daughter, Malena, chooses to return to Buenos Aires to help her grandmother, Ernesto’s mother, search for Ernesto’s remains. Other stories recount the struggles of women seeking refuge from injustice, exploitation and mistreatment and their encounters with the deeply corrupt government systems they have no choice but to rely upon. Martha Bátiz’s stories are narrated in plain-spoken prose that seems to eschew literary flourishes. But it is the unadorned frankness of the writing that gives the stories their urgency, that causes the pain Bátiz describes to hit the reader at a visceral level, making it all the more real, all the more affecting. No Stars in the Sky is a remarkable volume that grants a voice to the voiceless. Poignant and memorable, occasionally shocking, it is not for all readers. But those who venture into its pages will find themselves transformed by the experience.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews