Wednesday at Zenda. Foreign Non-Fiction Wednesday. This Wednesday, in this case, devoted to The Four Spent the Day Together, the latest novel by American writer Chris Kraus (New York, 1955), which has just been translated into Spanish by Gabriela Ellena Castellotti for the publisher Random House. With her usual prowess for describing the psychology of those who live on the margins displaced by normative and socioeconomic forms, Kraus builds here an artifact in which our contemporary condition as observers / voyeurs is strained by our peculiar relationship with the violence we witness, often mediated, others directly.
The publisher itself notes about the work: “
In a cold and bleak city in the mining region of northern Minnesota, three teenagers kill an acquaintance after spending the day with him. Marked by an environment of drug use and poverty, they are detained and jailed immediately.
Nearby, Catt Greene and her husband live in a house they bought to escape the sweltering heat of California summers. In the midst of a personal crisis, Catt becomes obsessed with the brutality of the crime and with the lives of the three involved. Gradually, the investigation pushes her toward her own family history and raises a broader question: how can a life be sustained in a fractured country.
Drawing on the true-crime story that shook the United States in 2019, Kraus —author of the contemporary classic I Love Dick— returns with an unclassifiable and subversive novel written in three parts. Between the true crime, autofiction, and a portrait of the North American working class from the Great Depression to the Trump era, The Four Spent the Day Together is a work about violence, social class, and the emotional exposure of our time: the era of social networks, constant connection, and the widening distance between those who have everything and those who can barely imagine a future”.
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Author: Chris Kraus. Title: The Four Spent the Day Together. Translation: Gabriela Ellena Castellotti. Publisher: Random House. Retailer: Todos tus libros.