Austral

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Expansive and thought-provoking" GuardianA dazzling novel about the traces we leave, the traces we erase and the traces we seek to rebuild. A novel with many ideas that lead in several directions, but I’m not sure they coalesced for me in any satisfactory way. Austral is a tender and thoughtful exploration of the painful irony of being alive and our attempts to make sense of the past as well as the present. Carlos Fonseca has written a book that is like a beautiful maze where we can discover new treasures at each turn."

Una obra que en inicio sonaba interesante, algo sobre la perdida de una cultura asociada a la perdida de la capacidad de lenguaje, desarrollada en diferentes lugares de Centro y Suramérica, con personajes nativos que en parte luchan y en parte se resignan a la muerte de sus raíces y tradiciones por la presión de la modernidad.But, it is beautiful! A university professor goes in pursuit of answers to a mystery involving a manuscript left by an estranged and recently deceased friend. There is a subplot (although important to the story) about New Germany, a settlement founded by anti-Semites in Paraguay, with a concurrent thread on Indigenous South Americans. The main themes of the book are memory, trauma, delusion, and disappearing cultures. Miles, Valerie (2016-12-09). "Literatura". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2017-08-30. The protagonists of this sweeping novel strive to piece together the past in all its cruelty to better understand themselves and whence they came. Austral juxtaposes beautifully the search for truth and the artistic process in a depiction that makes one indistinguishable from the other. With great sensitivity, Carlos Fonseca captures the sense of dislocation that comes to define anyone who has ever been displaced.” In Austral, Fonseca has created a profoundly literary project: to search for the traces of that journey of no return to who we used to be, and to leave a free and joyful record of his unexpected findings discoveries.” After attending high school at Colegio San Ignacio in Puerto Rico, he attended Stanford University where in 2009 he graduated with a degree in Comparative Literature. He then attended Princeton University where he obtained a PhD.

von Mühlfeld's had built his career around a theory that all culture was the product of miscegenation and contagion only to be challenged how this could be consistent with a dying language. He revised his theory to add In the passing from one culture to another, something always remains, even if no-one alive can recognise it but the obsessive pursuit of this thinking led him to Bernhardian insanity. Yitzhak Abravanel’s take on the tapes made by Karl-Heinz von Mühlfeld of Juvenal Suarez, which he listens to in the Swiss asylum where von Mühlfeld is incarcerated: In this innovative novel three losses and three quests are pursued. English writer Aliza Abravanel tries, in a battle with aphasia, to finish her book. A last indigenous speaker is confronted with the fading of his culture and language while an anthropologist struggles to prevent it. And through the construction of an esoteric theatre of memory, a survivor of the Guatemalan genocide of the 1970s and '80s seeks to recover the memories lost after the traumas of war. And behind these three threads lies the narrator's own story: Julio, a disillusioned university professor, must try to understand and complete his friend Aliza's novel, and come to terms with a past he shared with her but has blanked for thirty years.Austral is a testimony twice removed, about the contagion between literature and life. It references both what Gamboa has witnessed and what he has observed others witnessing. He writes down impressions, and when the time comes, he stops writing, letting things settle into place in the grander perspective. To witness and embrace solitude: “Literature is precisely what arises when language founders.” One character recollects a portrait of Edith Sitwell by the Chilean painter Álvaro Guevara, which another character misremembers as a fish on a newspaper. Mad ideas, fantasies, and literature impact the real; one image infects another and makes it transform. There is no such thing as essence; everything transfigures through mutual contagion. If you’re familiar with any Anglo language philosophy from the earlier twentieth, you know that “private language” is a loaded term. It refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s argument that the meaning of words doesn’t depend on our subjective sense of them but on the use of words in “language games”. Broadly and roughly, you may think of yourself as having a soul, but the meaning of “soul” or your individuality is out in the world of affairs, not inside your head. Your sense of “where your self is” and what your self is, is being challenged by this kind of analysis. I was pleased that Wittgenstein makes a personal appearance later in the book in a manner typical of Austral: in a book within a book, in a reaching kind of metaphysical scrapbooking dictionary (a book)within Austral. Cenup üç bölümden oluşuyor. Sırasıyla “Şahsi Bir Dil”, “Kaybın Lugatı” ve “Bellek Tiyatrosu”. Wittgenstein’ın dilin ve dolayısıyla bilincin hatta özbilincin de toplumsallığına vurgu yapan “şahsi bir dil tasavvur edilemeyeceği” önermesine atıfta bulunan ilk bölümde Julio’nun Humahuaca’ya yolculuğu, Aliza’nın ona miras bıraktığı son kitabından bölümlerle birlikte örülmüş. Otobiyografik öğelerin aşikar olduğu bu anlatının halkalarında Aliza’nın geçmişini, onu 30 sene evvel Güney Amerika’da bir “road trip”e sevk eden olaylar zincirinini okuruz. Roman ya da otobiyografik anlatının olay örgüsü kısaca şöyle: After the breakup, Julio will end up in an artist’s colony in Argentina, where there will be another, more life-affirming dog named Clarke. I’ve already restarted my reading of Austral once. I got lost in dark passageways. Australis a mountain of literature which repeatedly restarts itself. In a calm and lyrical tone, Carlos Fonseca’s works ambitiously seek to incorporate everything. They flirt with unified theories and take joy in connecting ideas in unexpected ways, his protagonists often losing themselves in beguiling mental labyrinths of their own making . . . It is this very bravery that makes it such a pleasure to read his intellectual thrillers about art, nature, and the quest to remake oneself.”