Gabriela Alemán in conversation with Dick Cluster

City Lights and the Center for the Art of Translation present

Gabriela Alemán in conversation with Dick Cluster

celebrating the publication of

Smoke

by Gabriela Alemán

published by City Lights Books

What happens to a country and its people after 35 years of terror? The author of Poso Wells and Family Album explores the aftermath of a dictatorship in this gothic family saga.

After 19 years, a woman named Gabriela returns to the Paraguayan capital of Asunción to visit what’s left of a family and a home that once provided her with refuge. Andrei, the family patriarch, now deceased, has left her his journal. Gabriela sequesters herself in the library to slowly read through it. The unanswered, and sometimes forbidden questions haunting that home filled with memories are made palpable: What secrets must be kept in order to survive? And for how long?

Alemán situates the present in an eerie, dreamlike atmosphere saturated by a sense of foreboding. In alternating chapters, the past is revealed as an impossible puzzle, riddled with ellipses and gaps. As characters from the past begin to show up in the present, the novel comes to a close as Gabriela learns the family’s hidden story, set against the backdrop of the country’s troubled history.

Gabriela Alemán is the author of ten books, including the novels Poso Wells (City Lights, 2018) and the short story collection Family Album (City Lights, 2022). An author of critical essays on literature and film, she is a founding member of the publishing house El Fakir Editores, based in Ecuador. At Tulane University, she developed the Latin American Writers Series, a digital archive of contemporary Latin American Literature. She currently lives in Quito, Ecuador.

Dick Cluster is a writer and translator based in Oakland, California. His original work includes three novels and two books of history, most recently "The History of Havana" (with Rafael Hernández). Other Cuban writers he has translated include Aida Bahr, Pedro de Jesús, and Abel Prieto. He translated Gabriela Alemán's two previous City Lights published titles: Poso Wells and Family Album (together with Mary Ellen Fieweger.)

Critical Praise

"Smoke is a truly remarkable piece of storytelling. In this compellingly meticulous narrative, Gabriela Alemán guides her characters to a suspenseful reckoning with their unreconciled histories in the South American backwater of Paraguay. In passages that alternate between the relentlessly vivid and claustrophobically dreamlike past and present, Alemán delivers a contemplation on human nature and historical memory that is as unsettling as it is unforgettable."–Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

"Alemán writes a uniquely Paraguayan magic realism that recasts the genre and echoes the country's tragic and tragicomic history. This is a beautifully written, haunting, and unsettling novel that lays bare the impossibility of disentangling personal and national stories."–Siân Rees, author of The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts

"Thrilling . . . with the Chaco War (1932-1935) between Bolivia and Paraguay as a backdrop, Gabriela Alemán weaves a rich and intense plot in which two generations fight against the violence of political power and nature."–Horacio Castellanos Moya, author of Senselessness

"Smoke captures the essence of our continent: the tenacity and audacity of immigrants, their nostalgia for the world they left behind, the betrayals, humiliations, and entanglements that always arise between those who are newly arrived and those who were already there. In this novel, through prose that is precise and often painful, Gabriela Alemán constructs a fascinating mirror in which we must surely recognize ourselves."–Guadalupe Nettel, author of Still Born

"The best Paraguayan novel since Roa Bastos' I the Supreme."–El País

The Center for the Art of Translation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, was founded in 2000 by Olivia Sears, an Italian translator and editor who serves as the Center’s board president. In 1993, prior to forming the Center, Sears helped to establish the literary translation journal Two Lines: World Writing in Translation at a time when there were very few venues for translated literature in English, and those handful rarely paid much attention to the translator beyond a brief acknowledgment. Two Lines set out to challenge that trend—to make international literature more accessible to English-speaking audiences, to champion the unsung work of translators, and to create a forum for translators to discuss their craft. In this way, Two Lines serves as the Center’s cornerstone, and the journal’s spirit radiates through all of the Center’s work today.

This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.