Abyss

Pilar Quintana

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Finalist:National Book Award -Translation (2023)

A 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE FINALIST

By the Colombian author of The Bitch, a 2020 National Book Award Finalist and PEN Awards Winner

"An eight-year-old girl takes in a series of troubling events
in this luminous and transfixing account of fractured family life from
Colombian writer Quintana (The
Bitch). Readers will be dazzled." -Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

Claudia is an impressionable eight-year-old girl, trying to understand the world through the eyes of the adults around her. But her hardworking father hardly speaks a word, while her unhappy mother spends her days reading celebrity lifestyle magazines, tending to her enormous collection of plants, and filling Claudia's head with stories about women who end their lives in tragic ways. Then an interloper arrives, disturbing the delicate balance of family life, and Claudia's world starts falling apart. In this strikingly vivid portrait of Cali, Colombia, Claudia's acute observations remind us that children are capable of discerning extremely complex realities even if they cannot fully understand them. In Abyss, Quintana leads us brilliantly into the lonely heart of the child we have all once been, driven by fear of abandonment.

Book Details

Publisher: World Editions
Publish Date: Feb 7th, 2023
Pages: 226
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 7.95in - 4.95in - 0.60in - 0.58lb
EAN: 9781642861228
Categories: • World Literature - Colombia• Literary

Praise for this book

Praise for Pilar Quintana

"Pilar Quintana uncovers wounds we didn't know we had, shows us their beauty, and then throws a handful of salt into them." -YURI HERRERA, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World

"How can I sum up everything that fascinates me about Pilar Quintana. Her incredible lyricism. Her path against the unexpected. The tension--razor-sharp, poetic and uncompromising."--SARA MESA

"Pilar Quintana is pure literature." --LARA MORENO

"Quintana has an impressive ability to tell truly deep stories that outwardly appear quite simple. Precise and concrete, her characters so human it's impossible not to empathize with them."-- SARA JARAMILLO KLINKERT

Praise for Abyss

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE

"An eight-year-old girl takes in a series of troubling events in this luminous and transfixing account of fractured family life from Colombian writer Quintana (The Bitch). Readers will be dazzled." --Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

"Claudia, the 8-year-old narrator of Pilar Quintana's Abyss,
lives in an apartment so overgrown with plants she calls it "the jungle."
Outside, the city of Cali, Colombia, is "gloomy and desolate, like the inside
of a very old house." She's frequently left to her own devices, her mother too
engrossed in celebrity tabloids like Hola! and Vanidades, her father working
late at the family supermarket. Quintana's spare, atmospheric novel, succinctly
translated by Lisa Dillman, explores Claudia's high anxiety and the terrors of
the adult world." --Anderson Tepper, The New York Times

"A terrifying vision of what it means to inherit our
parents' fears and disillusionments. Perhaps Pilar Quintana's greatest
achievement is to immerse us in Claudia's phantasmagorical jungle without us
really noticing, before swiftly unveiling a daughter's fantasy to a be a
mother's painful reality; to remind us that phantoms are all the more
frightening when they are real." --Times Literary Supplement

"A vivid and compelling
exploration of family dynamics and the damage they can do, Abyss is a
tale to fall into and learn from." --New Internationalist

"Chasms, both within the earth and between people, can be
hard to bridge, as Pilar Quintana (The Bitch) reinforces in Abyss,
her mesmerizing novel translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. Abyss
is a riveting story of regret, opportunities squandered and the fear that
family misfortunes will persist through generations." --Michael Magras, Shelf
Awareness, Starred Review

"Abyss, Pilar Quintana's second novel to appear in
English, is--like its predecessor The Bitch, also translated by Lisa
Dillman--concerned with the fraught relationships between caregivers and their
dependents. All that there is to praise about this novel--the complexity of
emotion it evokes in a reader, the success of its child narrator, the
undercurrent of dread in its descriptions--must be credited as much to Dillman
as to Quintana. A deeply humane exploration of relationality, Abyss is
unafraid t