Season of Ash

by Jorge Volpi, Alfred MacAdam (Translator)

Overview

"Jorge Volpi will be one of the stars of Spanish literature of this century."—Carlos Fuentes

The Soviet biologist Irina Granina has experienced the worst of Communism, struggling to free her husband from the gulag for years. Following the rise of Gorbachev, her husband finally emerges a changed man, but then Irina is forced to witness the worst of capitalism, as her daughter Oksana disappears into the newly rapacious consumer society and she loses her husband again, this time to greed and a lust for power.

In the West, Jennifer Moore, the scion of blue-blooded American wealth, takes a high-ranking job at the International Monetary Fund, where she hopes to bring the tough love of the free market economy to the unenlightened masses the world over. But she also has to deal with a philandering husband, Jack Wells, whose pharmaceutical company is a market wonder built on a house of cards, and her sister Allison, a free-spirited anti-globalization activist.

Jorge Volpi's Season of Ash puts a human face on earth-shaking events of the late twentieth century: the Chernobyl disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Soviet communism and the rise of the Russian oligarchs, the cascading collapsing of developing economies, and the near-miraculous scientific advances of the Human Genome Project. A scientific investigation, a journalistic exposé, a detective novel, and a dark love story, Season of Ash is a thrilling exploration of greed and disillusionment, and a clear-eyed examination of the passions that rule our lives and make history.

Jorge Volpi is the author of nine novels, including In Search of Klingsor, for which he won the Spanish Premio Biblioteca Breve prize and the French Deux-Océans-Grizane-Cavour Prize. Volpi is one of the founders of the "Crack" group—a prestigious Mexican literary movement.

Alfred MacAdam is a professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College and the translator of novels by Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, Juan Carlos Onetii, and Julio Cortázar, among others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781934824108
Publisher:	Open Letter
Publication date:	10/15/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	413
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jorge Volpi is the author of nine novels, including In Search of Klingsor, for which he won the Spanish Premio Biblioteca Breve prize and the French Deux-Océans-Grizane-Cavour Prize. Volpi is one of the founders of the "Crack" group—a prestigious Mexican literary movement.

Alfred MacAdam is a professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College and the translator of novels by Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, Juan Carlos Onetii, and Julio Cortázar, among others.

Editorial Reviews

"Jorge Volpi's Season of Ash is the kind of novel that reminds me why I read novels in the first place, but it's also the kind that makes me wonder why I bother to write ... Volpi is a genius ... you have to buy this book, and ... he'll end up with the Nobel Prize in Literature if there is any justice in the world."—Okla Elliott, Inside Higher Ed

"Volpi's Season of Ash is a comprehensive attempt to dramatize the historical, scientific, and cultural forces at play in the least seventy years of the twentieth century."—Alan Davis, The Hudson Review

"Every generation or so a writer comes along who liberates his peers from oppressive expectations of what Latin American fiction is supposed to be. Jorge Volpi's In Search of Klingsorwoke everybody up!"—Francisco Goldman

From the Publisher

At the heart of this wide-ranging epic is a murder, though it’s not initially clear who the victim is, and the narrative goes on to take the form of a confession that weaves historical and scientific turning points into the crime. There’s a huge cast of characters (and an appendix to help keep track), some famous, but mostly Volpi (In Search of Klingsor) presents everyday people whose lives eventually have as large an impact as dictators and Nobel Prize winners. Taking center stage are three mercurial women: Soviet biologist Irina, International Monetary Fund economist Jennifer and Hungarian scientist Eva; their personal and professional stories commingle as they are brought together by fate. A generous helping of racy material keeps the narrative from reading like a history book, though the many plots jumping between a dizzying cast can overwhelm. Volpi’s style of storytelling is about understanding history not through wars or elections but through people. His portrayal of humanity is rewarding and, by the end, shattering. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

This modern historical epic could just as well have been subtitled Six Degrees of Separation since it involves the saga of six major characters whose lives converge at the end. The truly cosmopolitan cast of characters includes Russian biologist Irina Sudayeva, her dissident husband, and their singer and poet daughter Oksana; the American economist Jennifer Moore, her businessman husband, and Jennifer's activist sister, Allison; and Eva Halász, a Hungarian computer scientist. To this mixture is added alleged narrator Yuri Chernishevsky. Covering 70 years of world history, the novel intercalates their lives, often almost arbitrarily, into some of the world's most recent important events, from the Hungarian revolution of 1956 to the aborted 1991 Soviet coup, to name just a few. Besides the major characters, almost 200 other names, both famous and fictitious, populate the pages. Mexican author Volpi arranges the text like a play, with a prelude and three acts, each covering a broad time period from 1929 to 2000. VERDICT Though impressively researched, the novel is also a monumental tease; after introducing three unexplained deaths, it forces the reader to plod through almost 400 vertiginous pages to discover what happened. The expansive but quickly paced retelling of historical events and the profusion of characters ultimately overshadow the plot. For ambitious readers.—Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH\

Library Journal