Restoration
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Propelled by female desire, shaped by the violence of the male gaze, and inspired by the endless vitality of old stories remade anew, Restoration takes on Bluebeard, Salvador Elizondo, Juan Rulfo, Angela Carter, Octavio Paz, Mariana Enriquez, and Amparo Dávila to produce a novel of obsession, reclamation, and romance gone very, very wrong.Jasmina has been hired by her maybe-boyfriend to restore his family home, a grubby, abandoned time capsule where a great artist once lived. As she moves from room to room--scrubbing, scraping, plastering over cracks--the stories inhabiting them awaken, and the lives of the women who came before her begin to overlap with her own. Who is the woman in the photograph? And what secrets linger in that last locked room?Restoration is a ghost story with porous borders, between Jasmina and these forgotten women, between the novel and us. And the questions Barrera asks may be about what's behind our own barred door.
About this Author
Ave Barrera (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1980) is a writer and editor. Her first novel, Puertas demasiado pequeñas (2016) won the Sergio Galindo Award and was published by Charco Press in its English translation under the title The Forgery (2022). Restoration is her second novel to appear in English. It first appeared in 2018 in Mexico and Spain and won the Lipp Prize. Ave has also published short stories and essays in several anthologies and electronic media. Since 2019 she coordinates the Vindictas Collection for the National University of Mexico. In 2023 she received a grant from the Kislak Foundation for a writing residency at the University of Florida, USA.
Ellen Jones is a writer, editor, and translator from Spanish. Her recent translations include Beyond Mestizaje: Contemporary Debates on Race in Mexico edited by Tania Islas Weinstein and Milena Ang (2024), Cubanthropy by Iván de la Nuez (2023) and The Remains by Margo Glantz (shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2023). Her monograph, Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas is published by Columbia University Press (2022). Her short fiction has appeared in LitroMagazine , Slug and The London Magazine .
Robin Myers is a poet, translator, essayist, and 2023 NEA Translation Fellow. Recent translations include What Comes Back by Javier Peñalosa M.; The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón; and A Whale is a Country and In Vitro, both by Isabel Zapata. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry ,Yale Review ,The Drift , Poetry London, and elsewhere; her essays, in Los Angeles Review of Books , Words Without Borders , and Latin American Literature Today .
Reviews
"A vibrant and singular voice, combined with an extraordinary technical maturity and a fascinating symbolic density." --Irene Vallejo , author of PAPYRUS
"Restoration is a thriller, not only thematically but - equally powerful - stylistically: Ave Barrera writes the same way Min engages in her restoration work: taking care of every word, every detail, as if it were a question of 'contradicting death'." --Literal: Latin American Voices
"Perhaps the most terrifying novels of all are those that give us a clear and authentic reflection of ourselves." --Letras Libres
"The layers that make up this story range from the young protagonist's obsessive love for a man, the architectural process of restoring an old mansion, the ghosts of the past that inhabit each character, to a face-to-face dialogue with Farabeuf, the famous work by Salvador Elizondo." --Excelsior
"Nothing is gratuitous in this narrative with secret passages that each reader will make their own. We will have to follow this author. With this tremendous novel we have no choice." --Crash
"[Barrera] delves into the inadequacies, indulgence and regrets that accompany both women of today and the past: love as a construct and sometimes as a kind of sect that demands sacrifices from its most naive members." --Marvin
"The author pulls at both ends of the rope - between curiosity and fear, seduction and humiliation, sacrifice and revenge -and she does so with elegance, originality and intelligence." --La Razón de México
"Beautiful... tough... terrifying." --Tierra Adentro
"As with today's feminist struggles, our central character looks at the connection between past and present violence." --El Economista
"Ave Barrera carries out a meticulous architectural construction in which each element serves to support the others, using words with the care that a good craftsperson dedicates to the tools and materials necessary for a restoration." --La Marea
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Praise for Ave Barrera
"Ave Barrera eases us into this microcosmos as strange and shocking as it is true, constructing powerful atmospheres imbued with very varied sensations, ranging from dreamlike hallucinations to terror, horror and beauty." --El País
"We must pay serious attention to the work of Ave Barrera." --Cristina Rivera Garza , author of NO ONE WILL SEE ME CRY
"The plot flows in an intelligent and audacious way: It surprises by the simplicity and malice in which complex technical aspects are solved." --Geney Beltrán Félix
"A wild ride for protagonist and reader alike." --Kirkus
"A fun and entertaining story of a great literary quality." --Milenio
"Delightfully written, full of revelations ... Such a literary discovery." --Radio 3 (RTVE)
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