Mondays on Zenda. Monday of Spanish-language narrative. This Monday, the focus is on El museo de la bruma, a novel by Chilean writer Galo Ghigliotto (Valdivia, 1979) originally published in 2019 and now revived for the Spanish market by the publishing house Candaya, one of the great houses of Hispanic American literature in our country. Engaged in its relationship with the political history of its territory, this fascinating Ghigliotto novel manages to follow that path without ever renouncing the powers of a boundless imagination, a fundamental ally in its way of embedding its literature in the world.
The publisher themselves notes, with regard to the book: “
This novel imagines an impossible museum at the southern end of the American continent. Built toward the end of World War II and destroyed by a mysterious fire in 2014, the El museo de la bruma gathered the remnants of a history that Chile and Argentina have preferred to look at from afar: the colonization of Tierra del Fuego, the Selk’nam genocide, the ranching exploitation, the arrival of Nazi criminals to southern Chile, and the persistence of horror during the dictatorship.
From an incomplete catalog, rescued pieces, curatorial files, documents, missing images, testimonies and rumors, El museo de la bruma adopts the form of a partial exhibition. It is a paper museum, a ghostly archive, and an imaginary investigation that ventures into those zones where memory and invention contaminate each other.
From a radical structure and with a political power rarely seen, Galo Ghigliotto constructs an work about impunity and the ways in which a nation fabricates, exhibits, and conceals its ruins. Awarded in Chile and widely read by critics and scholars, El museo de la bruma confirms that literature can open a room where official history has left only silence.”
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Author: Galo Ghigliotto. Title: El museo de la bruma. Publisher: Candaya. For sale: Todos tus libros.