Reviews by Annabel
This October, World Editions launched a new series of books by authors from around the world, which will go from A to Z, one country per letter. The first three have just been published with several more scheduled for 2027. Here are some thoughts on the first two books.
All That Dies in April by Mariana Travacio
Translated from the Spanish by Will Morningstar & Samantha Schnee
Lina is married to Relicario. They live in the quebrada, a long narrow valley in northern Argentina that is increasingly barren and drought-stricken on its rocky slopes. It’s becoming impossible to make a living and Lina urges him to let them leave, but Relicario was born and bred there, his parents are buried there, he won’t leave his dead who he talks to every day. Their teenaged son had already left with Lina’s brother Camilo, heading for the rainforest where there was plenty of work.
Lina wants to see the sea, and hopes to be reunited with her son one day, so she decides she must go, with or without Relicario, and one day she sets off with what food and drink she can carry, following the valley down and along, heading for the stream she has been told of that will lead her to the river and out of the hilly terrain.
Relicario can’t believe she’s left him. Ultimately though, he decides to follow her, but not before he’s acquired a donkey and a wagon, exhumed the bones of his dead and loaded them into coffins. He sets off in Lina’s wake with his macabre load.
Their journeys are hard, but Lina is lucky to meet some women with their goats just as she was beginning to despair with hunger. She’ll experience more kindness from strangers on her journey, before teaming up with goatherd Feliciano, who is travelling to a ranch where he knows he’ll find work; he thinks Lina could work there too. They reach the ranch and Lina finds out that they need a cook and cleaner, they being Don Luis, his wife and their nine children! It’s exhausting work. Meanwhile Relicario is still following in Lina’s footstseps, but has had to abandon his wagon, transferring his parents’ bones to a sack. Will he succeed?
This first half of the book is told in short chapters, many only a page or two long, alternating between Lina and Relicario, contrasting their journeys out of the quebrada. It ends on a cliffhanger as the household is thrown into chaos by a tragic event. Part two has a different narrator, with the local carpenter, El Talo, taking up the story, but I can’t say more.
What comes through particularly strongly in this novel is the sense of family; in Lina and Relicario’s separated lives, and the reverence Relicario gives to his ancestors. This contrasts with the huge family, and ensuing family politics at Don Luis’ ranch. The sense of place, particularly at the beginning in the quebrada is also a defining part of the novel. At a mere 155 pages and all those short chapters, the story has pace, but is eloquently told and translated. Travacio’s second novel, and first to be translated to English is a lovely beginning to this series.
The Woman Who Fed the Dogs by Kristien Hemmerechts
Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent
Flemish author Hemmerecht’s novel was first published in 2014, and translated a year later. It was controversial then, being banned in most of Belgium. The publisher’s foreword tells us how many shops wouldn’t stock it, and the author received death threats.
This is because she dared to create a main character based on the ex-wife of the notorious child abductor, murderer and serial rapist Marc Dutroux. Michelle Martin was imprisoned for not stepping in to save the young girls her husband had imprisoned in their cellar and was released from prison shortly after the book’s publication.
I can’t recommend this novel based on normal criteria, and although based on facts, it is a novel. But for those who feel strong enough to read it, it does offer a fascinating portrait of a profoundly damaged woman, even if she shows no remorse.
It is very hard-hitting indeed and extremely distasteful to read, being largely based on the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of Hemmerecht’s protagonist, Odette, as she prepares for her release from prison. She will enter a convent where Sister Virginie has paved the way for her, and has been counselled by Anouk, the prison psychiatrist.
Odette is obsessed with a Belgian serial murderer, Geneviève Lhermitte, who killed her five children by slitting their throats in 2007, a home-grown Medea or Magda Goebbels. Odette constantly compares herself to Lhermitte, considering herself to be ‘The most hated woman in Belgium’, as the papers call her, not Lhermitte.
The bulk of the novel follows Odette’s story: how she met ‘M’, fell madly in love, and willingly submitted to his whims and growing perversions, before becoming his accomplice. She was overly sexualised and emotionally numbed to the horrors of his crimes. A victim herself of profound psychological trauma, she, however, shows no remorse, but resolves to forget M, still in prison. Eventually, for those unfamiliar with the details of the Dutroux story, the meaning behind the book’s title will be revealed.
In a way, I wish I hadn’t read it, but also in showing the reader the depths of depravity and evil that can exist, by fictionalising true events, it presents a compelling narrative that was grimly gripping.
Annabel is one of the founders of Shiny and one of its editors.
Mariana Travacio, All that Dies in April (World Editions, 2026) ISBN: 978164286170, paperback original, 155pp..
Kristien Hemmerechts, The Woman Who Fed the Dogs (World Editions, 2026) ISBN: 9781642861754, paperback original, 222 pages.
BUY at Waterstones via our affiliate links – Argentina & Belgium
