Austral A novel

Fonseca (Natural History) explores art, violence, and madness in his stunning latest. After celebrated author Alicia Abravanel dies before finishing her final novel, her old friend Julio Gamboa receives a letter expressing Alicia's wishes that he edit the work. Upon arriving in Humahuaca, Argentina, where Alicia chose to spend her last days, Julio's given the sprawling manuscript of A Private Language, which takes the form of a journal based on diaries from Alicia's father, Yitzhak Abravanel. In it, Alicia describes his experiences in a Swiss sanitorium, where he listened to a renowned anthropologist recount his travels to Paraguay in the 1960s to write about the failed Aryan colony of New Germany, which was founded in 1886 by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. As Julio burrows into Alicia's recollections, his own past mistakes come to the surface. Unspooling the story across multiple timelines and places, Fonseca brilliantly interrogates the notion that, as Yitzhak states in his journal, "Repeating the past is a way of doing it justice." This is an evocative excavation of memory, loss, and legacy. Agent: Sandra Pareja, Massie & McQuilkin. (May)

A literature professor is compelled to untangle a mentor's posthumous writings in this work of metafiction. Julio Gamboa, the protagonist of Costa Rica--born Fonseca's third novel, has headed from Cincinnati to a small town in northern Argentina's desert, where Aliza Abravanel, a friend and mentor from decades back, has recently died. Aliza was a brilliant novelist and photojournalist, but a stroke rendered her mute in the last decade of her life and slowed her career. Still, she's completed a pair of unpublished manuscripts, titled Sketches for a Private Language and Dictionary of Loss, and one of her dying wishes is that Julio read them. Cue a knotty travelogue of intellectual and South American terrain. Julio explores Aliza's past, which has a loose connection to New Germany, a haven for antisemites founded in Paraguay in the 1880s; in a roundabout way, that ugly history is passed down to Aliza's father and then Aliza herself. The prevailing themes are clear: violence, colonialism, and how many stories of both go unspoken or land in "that invisible border where fiction blurred into memory." But Fonseca approaches this in a variety of registers, from semiotic musings on the expressive capacity of language (there's a fair number of Wittgenstein references), history lessons (much of the story touches on the 1980s Guatemalan genocide), and Aliza's writings, which blend fact and fiction, image and text. Which is to say that Fonseca conjures a very Sebald-ian mood, and translator McDowell ably distinguishes his purposeful stylistic shifts. The reader may feel much like Julio does when reading Aliza's manuscripts: "too many possible points of entry, too many coded trajectories." But as a study of the confusions of history and the challenge of language to get the story right, it's an admirably complex, intellectually searching work. A sage, brainy study of language and history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.