Chris Andrews

Lerena Dost is a dominant and successful woman until she and her psychoanalyst Suano Botilecue cross an ethical boundary and are disgraced, after their sexual relationship is made known. Both lose everything. Then, a chance encounter with a mysterious woman in an elevator plants a number in Lerena’s mind, which she plays in the lottery and wins. She decides that she will not touch her new fortune until she can reward her benefactor, who turns out to be none other than Dona Munava, the famed leader of a spiritual cult hidden away in the countryside far from the city. Lerena and Suano set out on a road trip to find her, travelling across the Panoramic Delta, a futuristic world strangely like our own, but with its details, its settings, and even its language altered in unexpected ways. The author’s musical and inventive style, brilliantly translated by Chris Andrews, creates a hallucinatory atmosphere, in which the one-time lovers relive their relationship, and confront its consequences.

One day in 1923, a middle-aged public servant is paid his salary in counterfeit notes; by the next morning, after a series of impossible complications which lead to a triumphant resolution, he has written a great poem.

Consumed with anxiety about how to dispose of the fake money, he ricochets from one encounter to another, with a chauffeur suspected of leading an uprising and a madman demanding payment of an imaginary debt, a comatose cabinet minister whose car has been overturned, his paranoid mother, two genteel golf-club-smuggling sisters, an obliging maid called ‘the last woman’ and three pirate publishers who finally push him to write ‘that celebrated masterpiece of modern Central American poetry, The Song of the Virgin Child.’