„I am eighteen years old and I look out at the Rio de la Plata. On Sunday afternoons, the nuns take us out for a walk. It‘s me, but from this side of time I see myself as if I were someone else.“ Lucía is a teenager who arrives in Buenos Aires to attend university. Her place to live: a nuns‘boarding school; her place to study: one of the most politicised faculties of the time. The tumultuous political reality of the late 60s and early 70s is the setting for her initiation into adult life and establishes a dislocated counterpoint, at times hilarious, with her daily life with the headmistress and her close companions. Before It Disappears (»Antes que desaparezca«) is built on a subtly complex yet diaphanous plot, which reaffirms Sylvia Iparraguirre‘s talent as a novelist and gives us this unforgettable novel with an autobiographical touch.

Russian authors burst into the 19th century with distinctive force and uniqueness within European literature, projecting their fundamental influence into the 20th century. Divided between the omnipotent power of the tsar – isolated in his fear of revolt – and the peasant people – subject to rural slavery – society had a single interpreter and a single spokesman: its writers. And only one representation: the one they gave it in their texts. With folkloric roots in Asia and an eye to the French Enlightenment, Russia produced all its modern literature in one century. Imagined and developed under fierce Tsarist censorship, its authors produced a narrative and poetry marked by an intense understanding of the human. After an introduction that situates us in the milestones of Russian history, Sylvia Iparraguirre analyses in Russian Literature Classes (“Clases de literatura rusa”) works by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov, who were of critical importance for universal culture and for all subsequent writers, who at some point have acknowledged that they are their literary debtors.

A reader discovers, during childhood, that she can live another life in books. More intense, passionate, unknown to others. She reads hypnotically Cortázar, Tolstoy, Bakhtin, Borges. Before and after, two large libraries sustain her: that of her grandmother in Los Toldos and the one she shared with Abelardo Castillo, whose portrait becomes a loving memory. From a reading diary, an album of poetry and her personal memory, the critical thinking of Sylvia Iparraguirre is revealed in The Invisible Life (“La vida invisible”) through an avid and genuine narrative.

In a small town in the Argentine pampas, quiet Sonia grows up in an orphanage. Only when the anarchist trade unionist Bautista, who spent many years in prison as an innocent man, woos the young woman does she awake from her long years of paralysis and turn to face life. Told in retrospective, the novel’s intensive characters and atmospheric descriptions of the broad landscapes of the Argentine pampas truly draw the reader in. After El muchacho de los senos de goma, The Orphaning (“La orfandad”) is the second part of a trilogy in progress portraying three generations of an Argentinean family.

The Boy with the Rubber Breasts (“El muchacho de los senos de goma”) is set in present-day Buenos Aires. Cristobal, or Cris, is seventeen years old and rather annoyed by his family home. His mother always takes his stepfather’s side, and he is always expected to help out in the workshop. He would rather be listening to music and indulging his passionate interest in philosophy. His teacher is Professor Mentasti, who invites him to attend advanced courses due to his incisive and independent reasoning. One day he packs his bags and leaves home. In a distant corner of Buenos Aires he finds refuge by chance at the home of Señora Vidot, a strange woman who seems to live in her own world. Cris does not know that her husband was lost at sea. She gives him a room without posing too many questions or asking anything in return. They both feel drawn to one another, and one night sexual tension becomes lovemaking. It is only later that Cris discovers that he has confused his new feelings with love, has new experiences and becomes more mature. He gives up his job as a seller of merchandise on the street – the rubber breasts, meant for relaxing office workers, were a real flop! – and, after a final talk to his Profesor who himself is passing through a crisis, decides to leave Buenos Aires.

With a sure hand and shimmering storytelling Sylvia Iparraguirre leads her readers through a compartmentalised city, in which flights of intellectual brilliance and bitter poverty, hope and hopelessness stand side by side, and where people survive crises and occasionally grow from them. The final scene, a description of the waking city and a young man making his escape, reads like the crescendo to a piece of music that gets deep under your skin.

After two volumes of short stories La Tierra del Fuego, her second novel, was shortlisted for the 1998 Premio Alfaguara. At the Buenos Aires Book Fair 1999 the work was awarded the prestigious Literary CriticsPrize as Best Book of the Year (1998), and the Sigfrido Radaelli Prize by the Club de los 13 for the best novel in 1998 and in Mexico the Sor Juana Prize.

In 1830 the “Beagle” sets sail from England for Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, captained by the young Robert FitzRoy. On arrival, the crew encounter members of the Yámana people. When the ship returns to London a Yámana girl, Fuegia, and three young men, one of them called Jemmy Button are on board. In London the Indios are introduced to British society and the royal family and later initiated into “civilised life” at a school in the country. Having spent two years in England, the Yámanas are returned to Tierra del Fuego by Captain FitzRoy. On board the ship this time was a young natural scientist, Charles Darwin, fully convinced of his science. Captain FitzRoy on the other hand sees it as his task to teach the Indios his language and culture and thus help them to achieve a better, more “civilised” life. He believes that once back in Tierra del Fuego the Yámanas will maintain their British way of life and pass it on to others. One year later, when Captain FitzRoy sails by Tierra del Fuego, he realises to his horror that Jemmy and the others have reverted to their old way of life and are living just like those around them; they want nothing more to do with England.

Tierra del Fuego. A Biography of the End of the World (“Tierra del Fuego. Una biografía del fin del mundo”) was first published as a coffee-table book and will soon be available in a more handy edition. In her introduction, Iparraguirre says: After its extensive journey from the north, the Andes, South America’s imposing vertebral column, stretches down to the continent’s southern most tip, crosses Tierra del Fuego’s Isla Grande, slips under the Le Maire Strait and then emerges finally, like a blackened, burned dragon’s tail in the Isla de Los Estados. This mountain range, right at the end of the world, was, according to myth, a source of shamanic power for the people of Tierra del Fuego. Marked by American largesse, nature rules dramatically in this corner of the world, towering over mankind. Men and women who behold these landscapes are swept giddily back to the beginning of time, overwhelmed by how small they feel in their presence, as they surrender to the natural boundaries that surround them.