The Entre Ríos Trilogy
AUTHOR
Perla Suez
TRANSLATOR
Rhonda Dahl Buchanan
The three novels in this collection, written by Perla Suez in Spanish, and expertly translated to English by Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, take place in Entre Ríos, the Argentine province where thousands of Jewish immigrants settled at the end of the nineteenth century. Suez weaves history and memory in these tales of passion, violence, and intrigue. Déborah, the protagonist of Lethargy, narrates the traumatic experiences of her youth in Basavilbaso, and captures the stifling atmosphere of intolerance and repression during the 1950s. In The Arrest Lucien Finz, a young Jewish farmer, leaves the rice fields of Villa Clara to study medicine in Buenos Aires, where he becomes a victim of La Semana Trágica, the "Tragic Week" in January of 1919, when government forces arrested, tortured, and murdered striking workers and many innocent people. Complot is an intricate web of lust, deceit, murder, and power, which spans the first three decades of the twentieth century, when Great Britain influenced the growth of the Argentine nation.
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Rhonda Dahl Buchanan, Professor Emerita of Spanish at the University of Louisville, has translated fiction by authors from Latin America and Spain. She received an NEA Literature Fellowship in 2006 for the translation of the Mexican writer Alberto Ruy Sánchez’s novel Los jardines secretos de Mogador. Her translations of Ruy Sánchez’s novels The Secret Gardens of Mogador: Voices of the Earth and Poetics of Wonder: Passage to Mogador were published by White Pine Press. Her other published translations include works by the Argentine authors Mempo Giardinelli, Tununa Mercado, Ana María Shua, and Perla Suez, and the Spanish poet Fernando Operé.
Perla Suez was born in Córdoba, Argentina, but lived the first fifteen years of her life in Basavilbaso in the province of Entre Ríos, a crucial period that informs her narrative fiction. She is a writer and professor of contemporary literature and received a university degree in literature from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. She began her literary career publishing novels and short stories for children, and in 2000 made her debut in the realm of adult fiction with the publication of Letargo, which was a finalist for the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Since then, her popular children’s novels and books have appeared in new editions, and her novels for adults, have been published in translations and new editions. The first three novels written for adults (Letargo, El arresto, and Complot) were first published individually, and in 2006, combined into one volume called Trilogía de Entre Ríos, to coincide with the publication of the English translation, The Entre Ríos Trilogy: Three Novels. In 2007, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel La pasajera (2008). In 2013, she received the Argentine National Novel Prize for Humo rojo (2012). In 2015, her novel El país del diablo (2014) received the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Literature Prize. Her works have been translated to English, French, Italian, Serbian, and Turkish.