Ladrilleros

A lineage of poor and abandoned, the men take parental hatreds as their own. Marciano Mirando and Pajarito Tamai act out the choreography and repeat the words that the men say. The intercourse, the fight, the resentment. Yet even in these seemingly rigid cultural patterns, love and desire take their own forms. In Ladrilleros, Selva Almada creates complex characters with extreme delicacy: intelligent, fierce, disenchanted, vital, even tender. The masculine world unfolds its secrets in this portentous novel and calls into question its archaic routines. The author avoids indulgence, she does not condemn them either. She listens to her dialogues, she unfolds the landscape of the coastline they inhabit and breathes the warm air of the atmosphere. She reconstructs her stories while giving them the freedom to disobey them. From childbirth to death, it seems to suggest, there is no one way.