Enero es el mes más largo
Keila Vall de la Ville
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In this book, the Venezuelan author turns everyday life into a story with characters who live in Caracas, New York, or Madison. And when everything seems normal between a young woman who helps a girl to bury a dead fish, between two teenagers surrounded by drugs and violence, or in the life of a woman who looks for depressing songs to cope with a separation, the time in the narrative stops, January seems endless, and we are trapped in a psychological environment of many questions and few answers, feeling what addiction is, savoring loneliness. And fear. Uncertainty. Or the estrangement that immigrants feel outside their country when they lose their compass or the light that guides their way. The seven stories that make up the book build fragmented lives that always have something to tell. Sometimes, as in “Fin,” we enter the dreams of a narrator who tries to free herself from them while she is awake. In another story, a woman waits for her lover in a border town hotel and, when she finally finds her playing songs with a cactus, she does not know how to approach her without getting hurt. In “Lighthouse” Lau tries to reconstruct the last hours of her sister Jac, who died at the age of thirty-five, and along the way reveals what living with an addiction looks like, the lethal effects on an addict's family and that “lo contrario a la adicción no es la sobriedad: es la conexión.” This is not the only story that deals with this prevalent issue. In “Todo en esta vaina es un flash” Clea and Cael, two young musicians who use drugs learn what it is to lose someone due to an overdose of heroine. |
The theme of being with one foot here and one there appears in several stories: through characters who do not know how to interpret the "Welcome" sign on a back door; in the English expression that suddenly appears in the Spanish narration to explain something that can only be understood in that language; or in the songs that a protagonist hears and that transport us to a Latin American world with the voices of Juan Gabriel, Julieta Venegas and Los Panchos, or to the American realm of Johnny Cash, Fiona Apple or Dinah Washington. In “El Triángulo de las Bermudas, or “Te voy a contar quién soy”, the issue of immigration unfolds in several dimensions. We find the desire to be a documented immigrant, the need to work doing anything, cleaning houses and offices, taking care of pets, watering plants, in order to save money. And above all the connections that one establishes in the United States with other foreigners.
Enero es el mes más largo is a collection of short stories that makes us think about our own humanity, about the fears and desires that are difficult to quantify. In what it means to be hanging by a thread, willing to leave for a better job opportunity. And in life, which is there to be lived but never to be understood
Enero es el mes más largo is a collection of short stories that makes us think about our own humanity, about the fears and desires that are difficult to quantify. In what it means to be hanging by a thread, willing to leave for a better job opportunity. And in life, which is there to be lived but never to be understood
Keila Vall de la Ville (Caracas, 1974) is the author of Los días animales (2016, International Latino Book Awards), Ana no duerme y otros cuentos (2016) and Viaje legado (2016). She has edited Entre el aliento y el precipicio, poéticas sobre la belleza / Between the Breath and the Abyss, Poetics on Beauty (2021) and 102 Poetas: Jamming (2014).
Enero es el mes más largo (2021) was published by Sudaquia Editores. Click here to purchase.
Enero es el mes más largo (2021) was published by Sudaquia Editores. Click here to purchase.
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