Catalina Infante The Cracks We Bare review, recensie en informatie over de roman van de uit Chili afkomstige schrijfster. Op 4 november 2025 verschijnt bij World Editions de Engelse vertaling van de roman van de Chileense schrijfster. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.

Catalina Infante The Cracks We Bare review en recensie

• “When her daughter Antonia is born, Laura thinks of Esther, her mother. A mother who was not especially loving, who thought the best inheritance was a good education. A mother with whom Laura had may differences, and who died from cancer when she was 18. Laura finds photos and postcards that Esther never sent; she relives vague and elusive moments in her memory, and discovers that she did not know the woman who lived in her mother.” (La Tercera)
• “A literary composition somewhere between a confessional diary and a costumbrista’s work that portrays society with some sarcasm, but also with the necessary dose of tenderness and hope. The author outlines, with a beautifully feminine intimacy, the shaken Chile of the last 30 year. The novel gives voice to an uprooted Chilean daughter of political exiles, in search of her own intimate identity, in a country that was foreign to her from the very moment of her birth.” (Cine y literatura)

The Cracks We Bare

• Auteur: Catalina Infante (Chili)
• Soort boek: Chileense roman
• Engelse vertaling: Michelle Mirabella
• Uitgever: World Editions
• Verschijnt: 4 november 2025
• Omvang: 118 pagina’s
• Uitgave: paperback / ebook
• Prijs: $ 19,99
• Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris

Flaptekst van de roman van de Chileense schrijfster Catalina Infante

Motherhood is terrifying, thinks Laura, feeling small and helpless as she holds her newborn daughter.

Instead of joy, she feels fear, and then anger at her own late mother for her absence. The Cracks We Bear opens as a story about new motherhood. Soon, however, it reveals itself to be an exploration of memory and trauma as Laura starts to recall her childhood in Chile. Born in exile to staunchly communist parents, she returns to Chile with her mother after the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship. In the fledgling democracy she grows up in, topics of capitalism and communism are ever present. Laura’s reflections, born from personal experience, are interwoven with raw and honest memories of her family life.

Borrowing elements from the Bildungsroman, and pulling from the Latin American short story tradition, Catalina Infante recounts Laura’s past in vignettes. Piece by piece, the short chapters come together like a reconstructed vase, bearing its cracks.

Catalina Infante was born in 1984 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is a Chilean writer, publisher, and co-owner of Librería Catalonia in Chile. She has written three books of stories of the indigenous peoples of Chile with Sonia Montecino, anthropologist and recipient of the Chilean National Social Sciences Award. She published her first book of short stories, Todas somos una misma sombraI, in 2018, followed by her English-language debut, Ferns. Published in 2020 by World Literature Today, Ferns was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and adapted into a short film by director Paz Ramírez. Infante’s short stories and poems have appeared in World Literature Today, Columbia Journal, the HarperCollins Daughters of Latin America anthology, and the Deep Vellum Best Literary Translations anthology. The Cracks We Bearis Infante’s first full-length novel translated into English.

Bijpassende boeken en informatie

• Chileense schrijvers en schrijfsters