The Woman from Uruguay by Pedro Mairal

0 hornets who have left their crate, multiplied , and begun their offense. Sidi and his companion, the gentle-eyed donkey, Staka, will face not only the hornets in the mountains but the soldiers on the road in pursuit of safety and peace. Parable, allegory, oral tradition—call it what you will, The Ardent Swarm in its English translation is simply a beautiful story. The contrast between sociopolitical constructs and nature’s designs provides commentary but also creates an engaging sense of pathos. The partnership between Manai and Vergnaud is equally brilliant. Touching and memorable, this is a work not to be missed. Joy Walsh Butler, Pennsylvania Aoko Matsuda Where the Wild Ladies Are Trans. Polly Barton. New York. Soft Skull Press. 2020. 288 pages. AOKO MATSUDA’S STORY cycle takes its title from the children’s story Where the Wild Things Are, the replacement of “Things” with “Ladies” alerting the reader to the text’s focus on gender as it retells Japanese ghost and yōkai tales, summaries of which are helpfully offered in an appendix . The ghosts of the characters’ ancestors haunt the pages and take the reader by surprise just as much as they do their family members. The corporal and the spiritual commingle fluidly, the latter—mainly represented by a woman who has died by hanging, her body discovered by her son, Shigeru —offering lectures and comfort for the cousins who connect the stories. Another character shapeshifts between human and fox in order to survive living in a world that does not allow women freedom of movement and denies their feral nature, forcing the vulpine woman to have “the feeling that she was just pretending to be a regular woman” most of her life. Many of the stories illustrate the struggles the cousins have reconciling their bodies with the gender norms enforced upon them by society, both feeling that they are already dancing on the edge of what is allowable in the physical world— perhaps giving them better access to a world beyond the corporal that demands women be hairless and men be stoic. After paying a technician to depilate her body, the unnamed narrator in the opening story, “Smartening Up,” is shown by her ghost auntie that hairless bodies lack power, leading the narrator to the early epiphany: “I want a skill, a special power into which I can throw my whole self. As to the question of what kind of creature I am, I really couldn’t care less. It doesn’t bother me if I stay a nameless monster.” The stories that follow tap deep into the cousins’ inner tensions as they question what kind of “creatures ” they are. Overall, these contemporary retellings of traditional ghost stories illustrate that the anxieties such stories uncover are timeless, and such tales are a fitting tool for exploring contemporary constrictions placed on people in their corporeal existences . Colleen Lutz Clemens Kutztown University of Pennsylvania Pedro Mairal The Woman from Uruguay Trans. Jennifer Croft. New York. Bloomsbury. 2021. 152 pages. JUST HOW MUCH can change in a day? For Lucas Pereyra, a fortysomething Argentine writer stuck in a rut—in his work, his marriage, his life—the answer is a lot. And all it will take to push him over the edge is a short trip across the River Plate to Montevideo, where he heads one morning to collect an advance on his novel-inprogress , a magnum opus set in Brazil: “This was going to be my great novel. I could sense it,” he writes. “A guy who leaves his wife and kids and disappears in Brazil, transforms into somebody else. . . . I was going to explode Spanish and then branch it out like a tree in every direction, a thousand things were going to happen, on the beach, in Brasilia, in the Amazon, lots of sex, and boats down huge rivers and contraband, drugs, shamans, shooting, wild parties, stories inside stories, it was going to be my Ulysses, my Devil to Pay in the Backlands, my total novel.” Upon arriving on the shores of Uruguay , the fog begins to lift for Lucas, as he WORLDLIT.ORG 103 BOOKS IN REVIEW looks out at “the friendly, broken, undulating landscape

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