This month our literary proposals They talk about lack of freedom and they transfer us to psychiatric hospitals, prisons and concentration camps. They are dark reads that have been published in recent months, some of them this week and that we would love to read. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to share them with you. Are you also interested in this type of reading? Take a look at them.
When the owl sings
Janet Frame
- Translator: Patricia Antón
- Publisher Trotalibros
Daphne Whiters' voice echoes through the dark room of a madhouse. Her words compose the story of her family and the tragedy around which she and her siblings orbit: Francie, who rebelled against dad's rules; Toby, whose epileptic seizures condemn him to loneliness, and Teresa, who clings to social respectability to cover the wounds of the past.
Janet Frame wrote her first novel, When the Owl Sings, published in 1957, upon being released from the last asylum where she was confined, after more than two hundred electroshock therapies and being saved at the last moment from a brain lobotomy. This story, with the heartbreaking subtlety of Katherine Mansfield's best stories, explores the ways in which she surfaces the pain in the different members of a family.
White torture. Interviews with imprisoned Iranian women
Narges Mohammadic
- Translator: VV.AA.
- Editorial Alliance
- Nobel Peace Prize 2023
Narges Mohammadi reveals the experiences of fourteen women in the most infamous prisons of the Islamic Republic of Iran: harassment and beatings by guards, total isolation, denial of any type of medical treatment... None of the women have committed crimes: they are prisoners of conscience or hostages as currency .
Women's prison
Maria Carolina Geel
- Translator: Cassandra Villlalba
- Peripheral Editorial
On April 14, 1955, at the luxurious Crillon hotel in Santiago de Chile, the writer María Carolina Geel shot her lover several times and killed him on the spot. The reasons were never known (there were those who said it was out of jealousy; others, an extravagant way to gain notoriety). The crime was notorious at the time and earned Geel three years in prison.
His stay in jail, Geel extracted a perfect opportunity to write, a gesture already transgressive, since it combined the writing of crime and the crime of writing. Beyond guilt or atonement, Geel describes and reflects on the female prison universe, an impassable and dark world, in a work ahead of its time that mixes fiction, testimony and autobiography, and which was most groundbreaking. when talking about crimes, life in prison and desire between women. For this reason, this book occupies, in its own right, a unique place in Chilean literature.
They will come to arrest me at midnight
Tahir Hamut Izgil
- Translator: Catalina Martínez Muñoz
- Editorial Books of the Asteroid
La persecution of the Uyghur people by the Chinese government has reached a terrifying dimension since 2017. Controlled by a highly sophisticated surveillance system, the Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim and Turkic-speaking ethnic group that lives mostly in the Xinjiang region of northwest China, are reliving some of the worst moments of the XNUMXth century.
Tahir Hamut Izgil, a prominent Uighur poet and filmmaker, has also been a victim of this repression. After an attempt to travel abroad in 1996, he was detained, tortured and imprisoned for three years in a re-education camp. Two decades later, the transfer of people to internment camps under any pretext it became so common that Izgil and his wife understood that their only hope was to flee the country.
The Transfiguration Hospital
Lem, Stanisław
- Translator: Joanna Bardzińska
- Impediments Editorial
The Transfiguration Hospital was the first novel written by Stanisław Lem and, at the same time, the first part of the Time Not Lost trilogy, an ambitious cycle, unpublished as such for sixty years, which describes the author's own experiences during the harsh episodes of the Nazi occupation in his hometown of Lviv.
The novel tells the story of Stefan Trzyniecki, Lem's alter ego, a young doctor who, in the first months of the invasion of Poland, finds employment in a psychiatric hospital nestled in a remote forest. The madness from outside filters little by little between the walls of the hospital, and so Trzyniecki is determined to save his patients in that place that seems "outside the world", in front of a group of sadistic doctors who carry out atrocious experiments on the sick. interned in the center. Meanwhile, the Nazis comb the forests for partisans and decide to convert the sanatorium into an SS hospital.