This World Does Not Belong to Us
-
-
2.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Lucas was just a child when his father sold him to another farmer as a laborer. Years later, Lucas returns, full of resentment and burning for revenge.
After years away, Lucas returns uninvited to the home he was expelled from as a child. The garden has been conquered by weeds, which blanket his mother’s beloved flowerbeds and his father’s grave alike. A lot has changed since Eloy and Felisberto were invited into the family home to work for Lucas’s father, long ago. The two hulking strangers have brought the land and everyone on it under their control—and removed nuisances like Lucas. Now everything rots. Lucas, a hardened young man, turns to a world that thrives in dirt and darkness: the world of insects. In raw, lyrical prose, García Freire portrays a world brought low by human greed, while hinting at glimmers of hope in the unlikeliest places.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ecuadorian writer García Freire debuts with the disquieting and visceral story of a banished son's revenge. Lucas, the strange, insect-obsessed son of a violent father and abused madwoman, returns to the manor house of his childhood after years away, including some time spent in slavery. The setting is atmospheric though opaque—there's an "old gramophone" but no cars yet. He encounters Eloy and Felisberto, two unsavory men who arrived as guests in his youth. In monologues, he blames his father for allowing them to take over the property, where his mother's gardens and father's grave are overgrown. Now, his return signals the end of their reign. As Lucas plots to reclaim his home, he addresses his dead father about what happened and who he's become: "For now, I'm as docile and obedient as a circus animal. Circus animals plan great catastrophes, which is why they're kept in cages." The property's insect inhabitants are ever present, some even personified, like the spider whom Lucas names Señorita Nancy, and they offer fodder for Lucas's potent meditation ("When I felt... as alone as a beetle inside an egg that never hatches, all I wanted was to return to this house"). García Freire unearths a brilliant sense of the miraculous from the swarming and putrid subject matter. The result is beautifully macabre.
