This World Does Not Belong to Us

by Natalia García Freire, Victor Meadowcroft (Translator)

Overview

“One of the debut novels that most stood out this year in Latin America.” —New York Times

Lucas was just a child when his father sold him to another farmer as a laborer. Years later, Lucas returns, full of resentment and burning for revenge.

After years away, Lucas returns uninvited to the home he was expelled from as a child. The garden has been conquered by weeds, which blanket his mother’s beloved flowerbeds and his father’s grave alike. A lot has changed since Eloy and Felisberto were invited into the family home to work for Lucas’s father, long ago. The two hulking strangers have brought the land and everyone on it under their control—and removed nuisances like Lucas. Now everything rots. Lucas, a hardened young man, turns to a world that thrives in dirt and darkness: the world of insects. In raw, lyrical prose, García Freire portrays a world brought low by human greed, while hinting at glimmers of hope in the unlikeliest places.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642861150
Publisher:	World Editions
Publication date:	06/21/2022
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	602,909
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Natalia García Freire was born in Cuenca, Ecuador, in 1991. She teaches Creative Writing at Azuay Universityand has also worked as a primary school teacher. García Freire’s journalistic work has appeared in outlets such as BBC Mundo and Univisión, and her short story “Noche de fiesta” was published in the Spanish literary journal La gran belleza. This World Does Not Belong to Us is García Freire’s debut novel. It was nominated for the Tigre Juan literary award and selected by the New York Times as one of the best Spanish-language books of 2019. It has been translated into Italian, French, and Turkish.

Victor Meadowcroft grew up at the foot of the Sintra Mountains in Portugal and translates from Portuguese and Spanish. His translations of works by María Fernanda Ampuero, Itamar Vieira Junior, and Murilo Rubião have appeared in the literary journals Latin American Literature Today and Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing. On his blog, Onomatomania, he publishes interviews with authors, publishers, and translators. His cotranslation with Anne McLean of Stranger to the Moon by prizewinning Colombian author Evelio Rosero will be published in the summer of 2021.

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/28/2022

Ecuadorian writer García Freire debuts with the disquieting and visceral story of a banished son’s revenge. Lucas, the strange, insect-obsessed son of a violent father and abused madwoman, returns to the manor house of his childhood after years away, including some time spent in slavery. The setting is atmospheric though opaque—there’s an “old gramophone” but no cars yet. He encounters Eloy and Felisberto, two unsavory men who arrived as guests in his youth. In monologues, he blames his father for allowing them to take over the property, where his mother’s gardens and father’s grave are overgrown. Now, his return signals the end of their reign. As Lucas plots to reclaim his home, he addresses his dead father about what happened and who he’s become: “For now, I’m as docile and obedient as a circus animal. Circus animals plan great catastrophes, which is why they’re kept in cages.” The property’s insect inhabitants are ever present, some even personified, like the spider whom Lucas names Señorita Nancy, and they offer fodder for Lucas’s potent meditation (“When I felt... as alone as a beetle inside an egg that never hatches, all I wanted was to return to this house”). García Freire unearths a brilliant sense of the miraculous from the swarming and putrid subject matter. The result is beautifully macabre. Agent: Marina Penalva, Casanovas & Lynch. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for This World Does Not Belong to Us

“Disquieting and visceral. … García Freire unearths a brilliant sense of the miraculous from the swarming and putrid subject matter. The result is beautifully macabre.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“One of the debut novels that most stood out this year in Latin America.” —New York Times

“A wronged, bitter young man welcomes his fate in Natalia García Freire’s novel This World Does Not Belong to Us. Lucas was just a child when his father sold him to another farmer as a laborer. Years later, Lucas returns, full of resentment and burning for revenge. (…) Visceral prose captures Lucas’s obsession with death, bugs, and other unpleasant aspects of life. (…) There is a strange, unconventional beauty to his morbid world—a beauty that helps him endure pain and humiliation and achieve an unnerving final calm. This World Does Not Belong to Us is a bleak exploration of how all ends in death and decay.” —Foreword Reviews

“A deliciously menacing read which I just couldn’t put down. Every word punches hard. This World Does Not Belong to Us treads the fine line between beauty and horror effortlessly.” —JAN CARSON, author of The Raptures

“García Freire manages to make us sweat with her characters. Feel the sting of their bites. This novel demonstrates a salient maturity, exudes literary knowledge, and takes risks. The writer masters the world of emotions and the words to encapsulate it.” —El País

“This book is pure beauty, pure love for the written word.” —Cope Blog

“García Freire takes us to the deepest parts of the human condition.” —Página Dos

“Full of courage and lucidity, Natalia García Freire writes against the current, she doesn’t care about buzz or dogmas. Her writing is inhabited by the voices of literary masters. What a mature novel from a twenty-nine-year-old who knows so much about life, the passing of time, old age, the absence of God and death. There are books that can only be written by those who love plants devastatingly. This is one of them.” —El Universo

“This World Does Not Belong to Us leads the reader into the deepest, darkest regions of human existence, where what is most infected and rotten becomes beautiful and liberating.” —Toda Literatura

“Why do we need to read this book? Because like all good literature, as full of inventions as it may seem, it contains a core of truth about human nature. We need to read this book because we are all parents or children and at some point we have questioned or question what it is to be a father, what it is to be a child. And above all because it tells us about a completely alien world that exists right next to us, or next to our feet—the world of insects.” —Recordo

“A maturity that leaves you breathless. This great writer forces us to lie down on the earth and be touched by insects, plants, and matter.” —Radio Nacional España

“Natalia García Freire is unbelievably young to have written a first work of such talent.” —Relatos en construcción

“There’s an echo of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo in this novel. The return home, the search for a father or at least the memory of him. The ghosts. Only here, instead of the murmurs, we have a constant buzzing of insects and the noise of animals.” —MARÍA JOSÉ NAVIA, author of SANT

“I am moved by its tenderness, the shadow of its flight, the kingdom it comes from. Insect and poverty. Larva and death.” —DARA SCULLY, author of Animal de nieve

From the Publisher