Mountain Notebooks

The girl who settles in the shack in Fernanda Trías's "The Mountain of the Furies" yearns for other materials, other sounds, other words, and even a different will to stay alive. It is the difficult and terrible beauty of the mountain that offers her this. The myths of profound nature and the savagery of the Anthropocene combine the original peasant language with poetic outbursts, which the Uruguayan author dismantles in visceral commitment. Thus, souls emerge to Earth.

The closed atmospheres of Trías's previous novels emerge to take in the fresh air beneath the black clouds. Told in hallucinatory realism, the narrator slowly contracts toward the interior that weaves the grandmother's buds with the mother's empty bottles. The human landscape mystically blurs into a corporal jungle that advances furiously.

“She didn't wipe her tears,” my mother said. “You let them slide down her cheek, and there was something in that wetness that brought her comfort. She called anger sadness. My grandmother had a puckered mouth and could remain silent for a whole day without looking at you. She called anger outrage. All our neighbors walked like that, giving their rage another name. They called it tiredness. They called it bad luck. They called it backache.” This summarizes the narrator's childhood hiding in the grasslands. She was born without wanting to be born, a wave of forgotten women in Poor Town, and was thrown into guarding the electrified fence of the mysterious mountain. On its slopes, she will teach her, “Can I explain this plant, or this beetle, in words?” she repeats to herself, and then, she will commission to watch over the thousands of deaths every day in violent and unjust Latin America. Until one, in the mud, in the garbage dump, comes back to life.

The inner monster of River Plate narrative collides with jungle gothic in this novel that speaks of sound and fury. Trías, winner of the 2021 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize with the anticipatory "Mugre rosa," tracks down this bleeding beast that symbolizes the plots of thousands of women on the edges of quarries and along roads. By distilling the poison that runs through the veins, and in the packs of men and machines, the woman who treasures this wild place rewrites in her own way the patriarchal destiny of abuse. The mountain, which hears and sees everything, plays second fiddle in brief chapters, confirming that it "can only be present, even though it contains the entire past within itself." Below, the men move confidently, despising it, until...

“No trace of them. The jungle devoured them!” concluded Colombian writer José Eustasio Rivera in the epilogue of the seminal “The Vortex” just over a century ago. A mark of the bio-inspiration that flows eternally from the mountains and hills of Colombia, and which Fernanda Trías simultaneously opens in notebooks filled with thoughts, not clichés, in her “The Mountain of Furies.” A wise peak that finally erupts and becomes a woman.

The Mount of Furies

Author: Fernanda Trías

Genre: novel

Other books by the author: The Invincible City; Other Ways of Being Human

Publisher: Random House, $31 thousand