Terror in Latin America: Five Countries, Five Great Translations
Here are five brief reviews of translated novels about political terror in Latin America. There’s a lot of terror to go around, so we’ll look at stories from Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Colombia. I’ll give a short review and provide a link to my more extensive review of each book. Got your plane ticket ready? (Some spoilers follow.)
1) Terror in Venezuela: A Review of It Would be Night in Caracas by Karina Sainz Borgo
Stephen King would be hard pressed to come up with a story more terrifying than this one because it’s based in reality. Our story begins with a young woman, an editor who works online. Her mother has just died. We follow her as she deals with the daily violence, chaos and societal disintegration that’s been going on in Venezuela since 1999.
The woman lives in an apartment in the heart of downtown so she has a bird’s eye view of the street demonstrations and daily violence.
She’s used up most of her money buying her mother’s medication on the black market. Now she’s alone. Her father was always absent and she only has some elderly aunts in a distant rural town. She had a lover, an older man, a journalist, but he’s no longer with us, thanks to the government.
