Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Fiction Short Stories (single Author)

The Ghost of You

translated by Margarita Saona & Luciana Erregue

Publisher
Laberinto Press
Initial publish date
Mar 2023
Category
Short Stories (single author)
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781777085926
    Publish Date
    Mar 2023
    List Price
    $23.00

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

*Margarita Saona's sparse, clinically precise yet mysterious prose casts a spell upon her readers. Nothing says post-anthropocentric like Saona’s stories. Her characters, resisting gender and other labels inhabit cities that while existing in the real world, refuse to be pinned down on a map. In Saona’s stories, animals behave like humans, humans, like animals, or the elements, in a relentless phantasmagoria reminiscent of ancient mythology. This disembodiment is present in Saona’s narrative style, having herself hovered between life and death shortly before receiving a life-saving new heart. The English translation, The Ghost of You, originally titled in Spanish La ciudad donde no estás, gives these ghosts an English-speaking home, in the hopes they can remain in the memory of their readers the same way someone’s presence stills haunts a place.

*Please see below for the updated Spring 2024 UTP Specials terms: UTP Frontlist Special Special: 50+ frontlist titles Discount: 45% Code: 1FRN Conditions: One order per code. Ends March 30th, 2024. Combinable across all Ampersand’s participating UTP publishers. UTP Backlist Special Special: 50+ backlist titles Discount: 47% Code: BAC6 Conditions: One order per code. Ends December 31st, 2023. Combinable across all Ampersand’s participating UTP publishers. Special: 50+ backlist titles Discount: 47% Code: BAC7 Conditions: One order per code. Starts January 1st, 2024. Ends December 31st, 2024. Combinable across all Ampersand’s participating UTP publishers.

About the authors

Contributor Notes

Margarita Saona teaches Latin American literature and Culture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was born in Peru and studied linguistics and literature at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru. She received a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Columbia University in New York. She is interested in issues of memory, cognition, empathy, and representation in literature and the arts. She has published books on literary and cultural criticism such as Novelas familiares: Figuraciones de la nación en la novela latinoamericana contemporánea (Rosario, 2004) and Memory Matters in Transitional Perú (London, 2014), and Despadre: Masculinidades, travestismos y ficciones de la ley en la literatura peruana. Her short fiction collections are Comehoras (Lima, 2008), Objeto perdido (Lima, 2012), and La ciudad en que no estás (Lima, 2020). She also has a book of poems, Corazón de hojalata/Tin Heart (Chicago, 2017) and an unpublished collection of poems entitled Precaria materia. She is currently working two books, a short essay entittled De monstruos y cyborgs and Corazón en trance, a memoir about her experience of heart transplantation.

Excerpt: The Ghost of You (translated by Margarita Saona & Luciana Erregue)

Summersault

We have lived in skyscrapers for hundreds of years. There are so many of us and we are so busy so much of the time, that it would be dangerous if we all walked around scattered through the city. That I understand. But when spring arrives many of us rebel a little, grabbing our bikes, going in search of the few butterflies we can still find. That is what I was up to, searching for butterflies, when I saw him for the first time. I raised my eyes, following the flight of the particularly pretty blue butterfly, and I saw him. He looked down, calmly, one foot in front of the other, arms relaxed at his sides and not extended in the typical position of the high-wire artist. The sun about to set grew larger. Its reflection on the skyscrapers illuminated his hair with an orangey brightness that dazzled me. I lost sight of the blue butterfly. “What are you doing?”, I yelled, intrigued. “What are you doing?”, he answered. It seemed to me that it was up to him to offer an explanation, there, suspended between two skyscrapers, on a high-wire that from below looked like a little piece of string. But my reactions are very slow, and I tend to lose arguments, so I replied: “I was following a blue butterfly when I saw you. What are you doing up there?” “Why are you following a butterfly?”, he asked. “I don’t know, but I asked you first. What are you doing up there?” “Why do you ask?” he said in reply. The game began to irritate me: “Don’t you ever answer questions?” Then he smiled and said, “Sometimes”, and without warning flipped in the air and landed again on the rope that swayed dangerously. And my heart, my ridiculous heart, flipped too, leaving me breathless. He looked at me seriously. At that distance it was difficult to be sure, but he also seemed out of breath and, somehow, pleased. I stood there not knowing what to do, staring back at him. I had a million questions, but I sensed he wouldn’t answer them, so I kept them in my pocket and got on my bike ready to leave. “See you tomorrow”, he said as I pedaled away, confused, dizzy, my eyes dazzled by the orange and blue reflections in the sky. When I went to bed that night in my room on the sixteenth floor, I didn’t miss the beaches or the gardens. I only felt that my bed lulled me to sleep, rocking as if on the high-wire. The following day, in the office, I found myself looking out the window every five minutes, imagining ropes hung from skyscraper to skyscraper, asking myself if he would be there, suspended in his pirouettes. The clock struck five, but a stupid meeting kept me a little longer and, when I could finally get to my bike I was thankful for the long days of the season. There were still several hours of sunshine ahead, but I was not even looking for the butterflies. I stopped when I came to his street. I looked up and saw him. He was sitting with a laptop on his knees, deep in concentration. I stayed there looking at him. For a moment I was afraid that a crowd would gather and stare, following my gaze, because that is what urbanites do, stop to look at what everyone else is looking at. In fact, the passersby were surprised to see me with the bike, next to the curb, looking up to the sky, and they followed the direction of my stare, immediately shrugging their shoulders as they continued on their way. As if there was nothing extraordinary about seeing an individual sitting on a rope between two buildings. Finally, I brought myself to talk to him: “Hey, what’s your name?”. “Oh, hi. Can you wait a minute?” He closed the computer and slid it down the rope. I didn’t see it disappear through the window. I actually found it difficult, from the ground, to see where the cord began and where it ended. It could have been the twentieth floor, the twelfth, the fifteenth, the sixth. He wasn’t lost in the stratosphere, but he was at considerable distance from the ground and me. He settled himself on the rope and looked back at me, seated, swaying, propelling himself gently with his legs. “What is your name?”, I asked him again.

Editorial Reviews

“The beauty in The Ghost of You is an experience in storytelling that one will not soon forget. It is a haunting that is done so gloriously that I realized at its end I was witness to the work of a modern master. This is a collection I will be grateful to return to and reread.” Carrie Stanton, The Miramichi Reader

"It fits on the shelf beside my beloved Clarice Lispector books, quite near books by Lydia Davis, C.D. Wright, Elisa Gabbert, Sarah Manguso, Kristjana Gunnars, Anne Boyer, Kate Zambreno, Mary Ruefle. And it’s not like The Ghost of You, per se, resembles any of these books, but I suppose in my way I’m organizing a very interesting imaginary guest list for a cocktail party."

Shawna Lemay, Author, Transactions With Beauty Blog.

Related lists