Not a River

by Selva Almada, tr. Annie McDermott (Charco Press, £11.99)

Two men take their late friend’s son fishing on an unnamed island separated from the Argentinian mainland by a river. The men, Enero Rey and El Negro, are not strangers to this place— they used to fish here as kids, and it was here that their friend Eusebio drowned—but a tense confrontation with local islander Aguirre destroys any hope that this trip would be a return to more innocent times.

Time is Selva Almada’s principal subject, but, like the river, its flow is mysterious and unwieldly, the island’s inhabitants constantly buffeted by its arbitrary currents. Every turn of the screw in the men’s feud is charged by either events that have been or events yet to happen, in ways both obvious and not: Enero recalls his recurring nightmares of a man drowning in the period before Eusebio’s death; the islanders meanwhile are seemingly already shaken by a trauma still years ahead of them. As Aguirre rounds up his men for a final confrontation with the trio at a local dance, you have the sense that things have already been long decreed by brutal fate.

What might feel like a convoluted narrative device in another author’s hands is here made deceptively simple and engrossing by Almada’s tightlipped prose, with its clipped sentences and near-violent cadences reflecting the men’s own way of speaking. Yet it’s an aping that also sends up the arrogance of these islanders, men who, despite the predestination of time, still think of themselves as its primary drivers.

Gripped from start to finish, I couldn’t help but think of a line from William Faulkner, to whom Almada’s translator Annie McDermott acknowledges an explicit debt: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” David McAllister