Édouard Louis
Who Killed My Father
Trans. Lorin Stein
New DirectionsPart memoir, part scathing social
critique, Who Killed My Father takes
France to task for its callous treatment
of working-class people, sentenc-
ing them, in Édouard Louis’s words,
to a premature death. In telling his
father’s life story, Louis gains a bet-
ter understanding of the gulf that has
separated them. Fans of Knausgaard’s
My Struggle will devour this slim but
resonant book.Native Voices: Indigenous American
Poetry, Craft and Conversations
Ed. CMarie Fuhrman & Dean Rader
Tupelo PressFeaturing a mix of historical and
contemporary writers, Native Voices
is a unique collection bringing indig-
enous poets, storytellers, and essayists
together to explore the possibilities of
language to capture vital traditions and
reimagine those that have been lost.
Featuring contributions from W LT con-
tributors like Joy Harjo, Allison Hedge
Coke, and Heid E. Erdrich, among
many others, this collection will serve
as a valuable touchstone for indigenous
writing for years to come.Nota Bene
as do names known to national and inter-
national audiences; while others are taken
from fictions by canonical authors (in one
of her appearances, J. M. Coetzee’s Eliza-
beth Costello meets Sáenz at a Guayaquil
book fair) or critics. Underlying that trans-
historical scaffolding is a searing critique of
the abandonment with which authors—like
the ones of the real anthology Poemas de
amor erótico (1972) through which Sáenz
came to life—assume their irresponsibility,
condemning subsequent critics and readers
who take hoaxes to be truthful.
To substantiate that she is not the inven-
tion of the poets who compiled that anthol-
ogy, or the author of the poem “Otra vez
Amarilis” attributed to her, Sáenz contends
that hers is a definitive “biofiction,” con-
scious that in cyberspace the poem is better
known than she. To set the record straight,
she questions the limits of scholarly atten-
tion by minutely examining her recep-
tion as “the most famous Ecuadorian poet
of all time,” which is, of course, the real
fiction! Drawing from major and minor
prose genres, adding six narrative “biobib-
liographical chronologies” that fuse real and
imaginary items, Báez Meza shows that the
rule of deception is that there are no rules in
an era of post-truths and fake news.
If one reads Nunca más Amarilis as
a vindication, Saénz dislikes Amarilis (an
appellation associated with determination
and strength) because of the travails she has
undergone at the hands of powerful male
literary types, providing Báez Meza a rea-
son to document various problems of Latin
American literature’s unreliable narrators
from the perspective of women—i.e., Cor-
tázar through Edith Aron, Borges through
María Kodama. Other critiques take not
too subtle spins, as when Márgara pinpoints
how Miguel Donoso Pareja, a minor Ecua-
dorian novelist and progressive critic, “cor-
rected” Bolaño’s acerbic fictional portrayal
of him (and supposed grammatical and syn-
tactical errors) in The Savage Detectives,
making the pettiness of social- realist writ-
ers stranger than fiction. World literature is
also present in the larger connections, as in
the brief “Historia universal de la impostura
metatextual.”
Uproarious precursors—like Augusto
Monterroso, Julian Barnes, Bolaño, and Ale-
jandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice come to
mind—in the section “Examen del Primer
Parcial Literatura Ecuatoriana IV,” a mock
examination in which all questions and
answers have Sáenz as a protagonist. Bola-
ñ o’s modus operandi is now vital to Latin
American authors of Báez Meza’s generation
and to assorted millennials. He is well aware
that the avatars of autobiografiction quickly
become their own literature of exhaustion
and, with that in mind, has sought novel
ways of renewing the twists and turns of
contemporary narrative structure, which
include lists, as in other world literatures. To
parody academic discourse, Báez Meza had
to know it well, and his enthusiastic research
for doing so is evident.
It is no coincidence that many Latin
American prose writers now filter delicate
subjective experiences through the prism
of illusory characters to partake of the cul-
tural history shaped by mass media and
the institutionalization of talent. Yet, allu-
sive on just about every page, Nunca más
Amarilis can be a contrarian wellspring for
affect theorists, for Márgara’s world (the firstWORLDLIT.ORG 99