A Humble Tribute to My Land
Reviews
By Cory Oldweiler
Selva Almada’s fiction is deeply attuned to the natural world—the potency of storms and fires, the physicality of lush forests and parched earth—but few forces are more vital to her characters than rivers. Perhaps this is unsurprising for a writer who was born and raised in Entre Ríos, a province north of Buenos Aires that is delineated by rivers that are dotted with lush isles, particularly the Paraná, which borders the province on three sides, flowing counterclockwise from Posadas in the northeast to Río de la Plata, the estuary that empties into the Atlantic Ocean near the Argentine capital city. In Almada’s debut novel, The Wind That Lays Waste, published in Chris Andrews’s English translation in 2019, Reverend Pearson’s life-changing baptism as a child took place in a river after his mother, “without a second thought . . . grabbed him under the arms and threw him to the river man,” who had just “emerged, long hair plastered to his skull . . . torso bare and arms outstretched.” And in her second novel, Brickmakers, published in Annie McDermott’s English translation in 2021, the dying Marciano Miranda finds comfort in the childhood memory of an idyllic boating trip he took down a river with his father: “He wanted to live in a place like that. With all that green, all that water; even the birds were more beautiful . . . with brighter feathers, more colorful beaks.”
Now with her third novel, Not a River, Almada accentuates the power and allure of nature in a story that synthesizes many of the themes that she has long explored in her writing: the fractured construct of family, the enduring bonds of friendship, the animosity toward outsiders, the rudderless exploration of childhood, the perils of life for women and girls, and the inexorable urge that makes men try to solve problems with violence. The result is her most accomplished work to date, a luxurious wisp of a novel that never wastes a word, in a vital and tender English-language translation once again by McDermott.
Not a River is a patient novel, slowly revealing itself like the landscape that appears anew around every bend on a river, with Almada gradually adding characters and backstory to swell her narrative toward a conclusion that, despite being almost exactly what you think it will be, is nevertheless revelatory. As with all Almada’s work, readers are firmly reminded that actions and choices have consequences, most often sorrowful ones, though rather than reaching the despairing conclusions of her prior novels, Not a River teases the possibility of transcending loss, even as it remains inescapable. The novel is one of six finalists for the 2024 Booker International Prize, which will be announced May 21, and while female Argentine authors have contended for the prize in six of the past seven years, none of them has won. I would not be at all surprised if that finally changes this year.
A contemplative, almost spiritual atmosphere pervades Not a River, which opens with two men and a boy bent to the substantial task of landing a ray that they have hooked from their small boat. Enero Rey and El Negro, both in their fifties, have known each other “since forever”; Tilo is the son of their late childhood friend Eusebio, whose drowning continues to haunt his old friends. Though “pickled by the wine and heat,” Enero repeats instructions—pump and reel, get her up—to the others “in a murmur, like a prayer.” When the ray is close enough, Enero, who was and possibly still is a police officer, leans over the edge of the boat and shoots the ray three times with his pistol.
It’s a discordant and brash note in a novel that consistently reminds readers of the pervading tranquility on the Río Paraná isle where the group has pitched camp. At one moment in the novel, “everything’s so quiet, so still, that you can hear the crackle as the [cigarette] paper and tobacco burn away.” In another, “there’s no sound, aside from the little moans that houses make in summer. . . . The concrete floor creaking somewhere, a new crack beginning to form.” Against this void, the gunshots, and what they represent, resonate.
As the trio pass around beers, swim in the river, and loll beside the dead ray tied to a tree branch “like an old blanket hanging in the shade,” some locals show up. The differences between the two groups are stark, starting with the islanders’ sure-footed, almost silent approach. They have lived here their whole lives and know exactly where to step so as not to damage the flora or disturb the fauna. In turn, the environment respects them back: “The woods have known them since they were yea high. After all, more than one had been conceived and even born right here among the willows and alders, the espinillos and pink trumpet trees. With these same reeds and cattails for their cribs.” In contrast, El Negro is seen as “an intruder” when he goes foraging for firewood: “This man isn’t from these woods and the woods are well aware. But they leave him be . . . for as long as it takes to gather kindling.”
Aguirre, spokesman for the islanders, questions the three bullet holes in the ray, and Enero admits that he got carried away. Aguirre’s response is subtly menacing: “You want to watch that . . . getting carried away.” On a return visit to the camp, he makes the islanders’ position more explicit after accepting a drink, saying, “We never turn down a maté on this island. Not even from an enemy.” During the first encounter, Aguirre mentions that the locals don’t care for the recent publicity that has led to an influx of visitors from the nearby provincial capitals of Paraná and Santa Fe. Enero and El Negro are not city folk, but that distinction doesn’t matter as much as the fact that they are not from the island. The insular attitude reminded me of a line from Dead Girls, Almada’s nonfiction novel about femicide in Argentina, which McDermott translated in 2020. In it, Almada is reflecting on her own small-town childhood when she writes that “if people from San José showed up at the dances in Villa Elisa or Colón, sooner or later there’d be a skirmish. Not because they directly provoked it, but because, for us, the presence of these undesirable neighbors at any of our gatherings was provocation enough.”
This inherent pique is prevalent throughout Not a River, as when Enero later asks a shopkeeper for one of his “coldest” beers and the old man responds, “As if we’d sell warm beer here.” The sole exception comes from Aguirre’s nieces, Mariela and Lucy, two lighthearted teens with the unspoiled beauty of youth who invite Tilo and the men to a dance. We also meet the girls’ mother, Aguirre’s sister Siomara, but she doesn’t interact with the outsiders as she keeps to herself and her home, where she tends fires, a source of comfort ever since she was a child: “Sometimes she thinks the fire talks to her. Not like a person does, not with words. But there’s something in the crackle, the soft sound of the flames, as if she could almost hear the air burning away, yes, something, right there, that speaks to her alone.”
While conflict between the locals and the outsiders seems inevitable, it is assured once Enero dumps the moldering ray back into the river, rendering its death senseless. Just before that moment, there is a last scene of pure innocence that merits mention. Almada excels at brief, intimate sketches of bonding, whether it is Leni and Tapioca talking in the front seat of a junked automobile in The Wind That Lays Waste, or Pájaro and Ángel going for a ride on the former’s motorcycle in Brickmakers, but she has never written a scene as buoyant as the one where Tilo, El Negro, and Enero dance and sing around the campfire as they listen to a transistor radio. Like a microcosm of her style, the intricate scene is an accretion of simple occurrences, reading in part, “Enero sings. Throws his head back and sings. Tilo breaks free and dances beside him as Enero sings, adding his voice to the one coming from the radio. El Negro claps along. The lit cigarette in his mouth. He puffs, exhales. Puffs, exhales. His free hands clapping along.”
In her previous writing, Almada has often probed the permeable membrane between the worlds of the living and the dead, and she does so again in Not a River. This liminal space first arises in reference to Enero’s childhood, when he dreamt of “the Drowner,” a dead man with saggy, “soft gray flesh, [his] cheeks eaten away by the fish so you could see the line of molars.” The boys go to see Eusebio’s godfather, a healer called Gutiérrez, who tells Enero, “You’ll be dreaming about him forever, so you’d better get used to it.” In a scene some years later, Gutiérrez has fallen “into disrepute” after failing to heal a paralyzed man, forcing him “to go back to treating the poor, to curing indigestion, worming kids, and removing unwanted babies from their mothers’ wombs.” He is in the novel only briefly but evokes Old Lady Borges from Sara Gallardo’s January, a book that Almada highlighted in a Q & A with the Booker Prize committee.
Some interactions between the living and the dead are more concrete than Enero’s dreams. In Brickmakers, both Marciano and Pájaro, who have fatally wounded each other in a knife fight when the novel opens, commune with the spirits of their long-dead fathers. And in Dead Girls, Almada herself uses a medium to gain insight into the murdered young women she is researching, crediting Silvia Promeslavsky as her “local guide to the indefinite zone.” I will leave it to readers to discover where the indefinite zone arises in Not a River, but it has never felt more poignant, loosely entwined with another of Almada’s regular themes, the discrepancies in the childhoods of boys and girls in Argentina. The most horrifying manifestation of these differences is the scourge of femicide, which is addressed only obliquely in Not a River, through repeated references to the treatment of and attitudes toward women and girls. One of the most stinging instances comes during Enero’s formative rookie assignment in the north of Entre Ríos, where his police chief serially dates, impregnates, and then discards girls who “could’ve been his daughter,” boasting to the cadet, “That’s how it goes here.”
Almada’s work is always deeply considered, but the elements at play in Not a River work in unrelenting concert. The isolation. The wretchedness of loss. The gently supernatural. The soporific combination of heat and alcohol. Even lines of dialogue, which are presented without quotation marks, are often set apart from their speaker by periods and line breaks, forcing the reader to focus on what is being said before processing who said it. (In these instances, something like “Nope.” appears on one line, and “Says Enero.” appears on the following.) Almada does the same thing in the original Spanish version, and it is heartening to see McDermott’s translation retain such an unorthodox but effective conceit.
The most concrete evocation of the local’s devotion to their environment can be seen in the novel’s title, which in Spanish was the slightly more expansive No es un río. When Eusebio, Enero, and El Negro went fishing as kids and young adults, they weren’t precious about knowing where they went, “the same island or the next one along or the one after that. In the memory it’s all just the island, with no name or exact coordinates.” To Aguirre and his friends and family, however, this dismissive generalization toward their home is the same as dismissing them as people. To them, it is not just an island; it is their island. Just as in Aguirre’s mind, “it wasn’t a ray” that Enero and El Negro killed, “it was that ray. A beautiful creature stretched out in the mud at the bottom, she’d have shone white like a bride in the lightless depths. . . . Pulled from the river to be thrown back in later. Dead.”
A final aspect of Almada’s work that might not be as apparent to readers outside of Argentina is its political significance. All of her writing is set in la Argentina profunda, the contiguous interior provinces of Entre Ríos, Santa Fe, and Córdoba that have been, as Almada told the Booker Prize committee, historically marginalized and impoverished, most recently by the neoliberal policies of the 1990s, which seem poised for a resurgence after the election of President Javier Milei in late 2023. Almada finished writing Not a River four years ago, “when it was unthinkable that Argentina could be governed again by the right wing,” and says the novel is her “humble tribute to my land: to its rivers, its animals, its trees and the people who live in it.” The least we can do is take time to learn about those whose lives are different and try to respect them, at minimum through literature and other works of art. It should be an easy choice, not a burden.
Cory Oldweiler is an itinerant writer who focuses on literature in translation. In 2022, he served on the long-list committee for the National Book Critics Circle’s inaugural Barrios Book in Translation Prize. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Star Tribune, Los Angeles Review of Books, Washington Post, and other publications.
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