Mondays at Zenda. Mondays of Spanish-language storytelling. This Monday, in this instance, devoted to the work Apócrifas (La Caja Books), by Lola Nieto. The prose of this writer traverses the boundaries of the strange, the mythical, science fiction, and corporeal horror; it draws on the voices of Hilma af Klint, Emily Dickinson and Hadewijch of Antwerp, and it delves into the sources of Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. With all of this she weaves a world in which the stories connect and assemble like the nodes of a vast spiderweb.
In the publisher’s own words: “In these tales the human element fades away. Language reveals itself as an alien parasite that colonizes the imagination of visionary painters, distressed girls, and mystical writers. The only lingua franca shared by the beings of Apócrifas is the pain that courses through their viscous organisms, their mutilated figures, their bodies that become cats, snakes, spiders, whales. That pain traverses time and space. It fuels the inquisitorial pyres on which a thirteenth‑century beguine burns, the timeless rites that Wa women carry out in the depths of the cosmos, the offering of a Siamese twin so that her sister may live, the confinement of the idols of a K‑pop group in a dystopian Seoul, the atonement of a mother who submits to a fungal entity because she cannot bear the loss of her daughter, the dreams of a girl who harbors two hearts in her chest.”
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Author: Lola Nieto. Title: Apócrifas. Publisher: La Caja Books. Availability: Todostuslibros.