Brickmakers <\/em>is one of the best books I\u2019ve read this year.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/601\/2021\/12\/Brickmakers.png\")
<\/p>\n
As the narrative opens, we meet two young men lying close to death in an amusement park. Rivals in a multi-generational family conflict, P\u00e1jaro and Marciano have each avenged their family\u2019s honour in a knife fight, and are now bleeding to death as a result. This is the present, which unfolds slowly in the course of the novel, but is punctuated by extended flashbacks to a past in which the two young men had a future. We know the novel\u2019s conclusion at its beginning, then, but this does not in any way diminish the drama or the pathos of the narrative. In fact, by meeting P\u00e1jaro and Marciano so vulnerable in their proximity to death, we see a side of them that would not necessarily have been evident in the bravado and machismo of their adolescence and coming-of-age. Marciano \u201cwants to get his face out of the mud and closer to the cool dawn air, see if he can\u2019t suck some of that fresh, newborn air inside him. Time is precious, they say, but not the pittance he\u00a0 has left; loose change at the bottom of a pocket.\u201d P\u00e1jaro, meanwhile, \u201ccoughs and that soft sweet warm whatever leaves his mouth \u2026 His eyes fill with tears that trickle from the corners, seeping all the way behind his ears. He lets his arm drop, rests his palm in the mud.\u201d Lying abandoned in the mud, these two are not heroes but victims, and this is part of Almada\u2019s brilliance in terms of storytelling: characters who might not behave in an endearing or likeable way are not left as one-dimensional caricatures but have depths that become apparent when we encounter them at their most defenceless.<\/p>\n
In a hallucinatory state close to death, the young men are visited by the ghosts of their fathers, with whom they both had a traumatic relationship: while Marciano\u2019s was a drunk who ended up brutally murdered after emerging from a late-night card game, P\u00e1jaro\u2019s was an abusive and sadistic man who abandoned his family and left his son feeling that \u201cone day his body will be big enough for the fury he\u2019s lived with all his life.\u201d The machismo leaks from the pages: the men\u2019s disappointment at having daughters, pride in having sons, preference for abandoning hard labour and instead propping up bars where they could \u201cexchang[e] tips on how to treat women so they\u2019d stay in line and know their place.\u201d The women, meanwhile, toil thanklessly, accepting that \u201cmen always wound up hitting their wives in the end\u201d and holding their broken families together as best they can. As in The Wind That Lays Waste<\/em>, the landscape reflects the heightened situation and emotions, offering \u201cdays when the heat cracks the earth\u201d in a place where \u201call anyone knows is violence and force.\u201d<\/p>\nP\u00e1jaro and Marciano grow up with this rivalry and violence, and yet as boys they are inseparable friends, offering the possibility of redemption for their fathers \u2013 yet as anyone who has read The Wind That Lays Waste <\/em>will know, Almada is not prone to redeeming her characters in emotional reconciliations and the enlightenment of self-awareness. Instead, through a series of misunderstandings, the boys end up hardening into the same sworn enemies their fathers were: \u201cNot for nothing were they their fathers; sons, each one a chip off the old block. That minor grudge, as time went by, hardened to stone in each boy\u2019s heart. And by the winter holidays, the pair, who\u2019d been inseparable until the summer before, were irreconcilable enemies.\u201d<\/p>\nBrickmakers<\/em> is translated by Annie McDermott, who also translated Almada\u2019s journalistic fiction Dead Girls <\/em>(a powerful interrogation of femicides in Argentina, brought to us by Charco in 2020 and reviewed here<\/a>), and it\u2019s a fantastic pairing. McDermott brings to the translation her characteristic sensitivity towards register and context: she deftly replicates the unique blend of epic dramatisation that sweeps across the landscape and small-town lives and the slang that goes along with them. I particularly appreciated the occasional term being left in Spanish (\u201cindio\u201d, \u201cmencho\u201d, \u201ctelenovela\u201d, \u201ctagada\u201d, \u201csome chinita from the barrios\u201d); this refusal to adapt the culturally specific and dilute it through familiarity is a judicious means of asking readers to come towards translated literature and cultural difference rather than expecting it to arrive with us in a neatly recognisable packaged form.<\/p>\nOverall, this short novel covers ingrained machismo, rivalry, generational conflict, gender violence and sexual prejudice, with no sermonising or unnecessary melodrama. It\u2019s a brilliant, sizzling, unmissable treat \u2013 and if you\u2019re still not convinced, then let me end with the tantalising promise that the final line alone is worth you giving this book a whirl.<\/p>\n
Review copy of Brickmakers <\/em>provided by Charco Press<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Translated from Spanish (Argentina) by Annie McDermott (Charco Press, 2021) Brickmakers is the second in Selva Almada\u2019s \u201ctrilogy of men\u201d, and was recently released by Charco Press. The first in the trilogy was the magnificent The Wind That Lays Waste (translated by Chris Andrews and published by Charco in 2019 \u2013 review here if you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[95,115,167,195,833],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
Review: BRICKMAKERS by Selva Almada - Translating Women<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/2021\/12\/15\/brickmakers\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Review: BRICKMAKERS by Selva Almada - Translating Women\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Translated from Spanish (Argentina) by Annie McDermott (Charco Press, 2021) Brickmakers is the second in Selva Almada\u2019s \u201ctrilogy of men\u201d, and was recently released by Charco Press. 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