A Luminous Republic
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
One day, the children begin to show up in the subtropical town of San Crist�bal, unwashed and hungry. No one knows where they have come from or where they disappear to each night. And then they rob a supermarket and stab two adults, bringing fear to the town.
So begins a thrilling morality tale that retraces the lines between good and evil, the civil and the wild, dragging our assumptions about childhood and innocence out into the light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wild children upend a city on the edge of the jungle in this lyrical, chilling novel from Barba (Such Small Hands). After marrying an older woman with a nine-year-old daughter named Maia, the unnamed narrator moves with them to the woman's hometown of San Crist bal in an unidentified South American country in the mid-1990s, where he lands a job as a civil servant. The narrator looks back from the present on his initial years in the provincial city two decades earlier, defined by the emergence of a violent group of child beggars that unsettles the bourgeois population. As the narrator's employer, the Department of Social Affairs, founders in its attempts to address the situation, the children's encounters with law enforcement turn aggressive, leading to the death of an officer by friendly fire during a scuffle, after which the children go into hiding. Paranoia over the children's threat to society intensifies when other children begin deserting their families to join the feral mob. Maia's biological father adds to the pressure campaign to find them after his 12-year-old son disappears, leading the narrator to a series of extremely difficult choices. The civil servant's guilt and ongoing perplexity over what happened sharpens the impact of Barba's spare, philosophical narrative. This frightening picture of the strangeness of childhood will endure.)
Customer Reviews
Shining example
Author
Spanish. Winner of multiple awards.
Plot
It's the mid-1990s when a rising star of the Argentine department of social relations is dispatched to head up the service in the fictional San Cristóbal, a relatively prosperous but otherwise unremarkable provincial city of 200,000 on a river and surrounded by jungle. Then 32 feral kids who speak an unknown dialect appear, apparently out of the jungle, scavenging and scrounging for and money. Their criminal activity intensifies and become violent. Authorities struggle to cope. A massacre ensues, then an investigation, where our boy copes blame.
Writing
Unnamed narrator (the social affairs bureaucrat who only ever refers to his stepdaughter as 'the girl') provides tightly controlled reportage that contrasts with the emotional nature of the story, but is a perfect way to present it. There's a Lord of The Flies vibe, and more.
Bottom line
In an interview, Barba said he believed that capitalism has prejudiced us against the idea of an anarchist utopia. Whether he demonstrates the wrong headedness of that notion here is moot, but he certainly highlighted it artfully. In either case, it's worth reading for the style.