Austral

From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling novel about legacy, memory, and the desire to know and be known.
Julio is a disillusioned professor of literature, a per­petual wanderer who has spent years away from his home, teaching in the United States. He receives a posthumous summons from an old friend, the writer Aliza Abravanel, to uncover the mysteries within her final novel. Aliza had raced to finish her work as her mind deteriorated. In her man­uscript is a series of interconnected accouncs of loss, tales that set Julio hurtling on a journey to uncover their true meaning. Austral tracks Julio's trip from Aliza's home in an Argentine artists' colony to a forgotten city in Guatemala, to the Peruvian Amazon, and through Nueva Germania, the anti­semitic commune in Paraguay founded by Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche.
A story of mourning and return-to one's na­tive country, to one's darkest memories, to oneself­ Carlos Fonseca's Austral interrogates the...