Carlos Fonseca Surez was born in Costa Rica in 1987 and
grew up in Puerto Rico. His work has appeared in publications
including The Guardian, BOMB, The White Review and Asymptote. He
currently teaches at the University of Cambridge and lives in
London.
Megan McDowell is a Spanish-language literary translator
from Kentucky. Her work includes books by Alejandro Zambra, Samanta
Schweblin, Lina Meruane, Mariana Enrquez, lvaro Bisama, Arturo
Fontaine, and Juan Emar. Her translations have been published in
The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney's, Words
Without Borders, Mandorla, and VICE, among others. Her translation
of Zambra's novel Ways of Going Home won the 2013 PEN Award for
Writing in Translation. She lives in Santiago, Chile.
“Beware, reader, in these pages you will experience vertigo,
anxiety and joy. You will become a ghostly presence in a Borgesian
world, a camera obscura, where mathematics is a secret weapon, and
memory the object of an archaeological pursuit. Loosely inspired by
the eventful life of the French mathematician Alexander
Grothendieck, Fonseca has created a gorgeous opera prima . .
. Colonel Lágrimas is playful and experimental in the
tradition of writers like Calvino and Queneau. Fonseca employs the
magic of perspective and shifting angles to summon a Cubist
portrait of a very sleepy, insouciant old man who witnessed some of
the great political events of the 20th century, from the Spanish
Civil War to Vietnam . . . Deftly translated, the voice
remains sedate, elegant, whispered even; we wouldn’t want to wake
the colonel.”
—Valerie Miles, The New York Times Book Review
“So much of the writing in Carlos Fonseca Suárez’s Colonel Lágrimas
was just gorgeous, and Megan McDowell’s translation from the
original Spanish managed to keep the beautiful complexity of the
language intact.”
—Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews, 2016 Reviewer’s Choice
"An intriguing and unforgettable verbal kaleidoscope."
—Ricardo Piglia, author of Target in the Night and Artificial
Respiration
“A true feat of literary ventriloquism and cinematic control,
tinged with a humor and melancholy inspired by the human condition.
Whether we think of it as a game of masks or as a Cubist portrait,
Fonseca's novel reads like an Oulipian puzzle where historical
memory can play hide-and-seek . . . The novel has a panoramic
and worldly vision. There's something vast, all-embracing, and
decidedly humanist about the project.”
—Chloe Aridjis, BOMB
“In this pretty puzzle, Fonseca tests the limits of fiction . . .
Fonseca’s narration mimics the meandering matrix of memory or an
esoteric police procedural by Jorge Luis Borges . . . For
lovers of literary and Latin American postmodern fiction.”
—Sara Martinez, Booklist
“Reading [Fonseca’s] work, one feels the presence of voices as
disparate as those of W.G. Sebald, Alexander Von Humboldt, Simón
Bolívar and Roberto Bolaño, among others. Fonseca is, without a
doubt, a cosmopolitan offspring of cultural globalization as well
as an attentive inheritor of both literary and cultural history . .
. Through an attentive and rigorous attention to detail,
Fonseca is able to construct a collage where the mathematician’s
life finds its ultimate meaning amidst a series of series of
historical, metaphysical and poetic fragments that end up giving
shape to a fascinating literary artifact that shines like an
eclectic mosaic . . . Colonel Lágrimas is a novel that
showcases the craft of writing. Throughout its pages, it becomes
apparent that its writerly resources are managed with a certain
fluency and experimentation but, at the same time, with notable
confidence.”
—Tomás Peters, Electric Literature
“Though the novel nods mostly to García Márquez, Fonseca plays with
the possibilities of hypertext raised by Julio Cortázar, and there
are hints of Bolaño and perhaps even of younger contemporary Daniel
Galera . . . a lively, smart study of a decidedly offbeat
character.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“In the process of this game of coding and decoding, Fonseca
deploys a torrent of vital and poetic ideas within a singular yet
fascinating literary artifact…. [Colonel Lágrimas makes me think
of] Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, W.G. Sebald, Borges, Juan
Rulfo.”
—Gunter Silva, Words without Borders
“Colonel Lágrimas is a clever book, slightly claustrophobic in its
setting, but spanning the globe through its focus on the old man’s
memories…. It’s beautifully written, with more good work here by
the excellent McDowell…. [The tedium of the Colonel’s life,] in
Fonseca’s hands, far from being something to grieve, becomes a
celebration of a life less ordinary.”
—Tony Malone, Tony’s Reading List
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