From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling novel about legacy memory and the desire to know and be
known.Julio is a disillusioned professor of literature a perpetual wanderer who has spent
years away from his home teaching in the United States. He receives a posthumous summons from
an old friend the writer Aliza Abravanel to uncover the mysteries within her final novel.
Aliza had raced to finish her work as her mind deteriorated. In her manuscript is a series of
interconnected accounts of loss tales that set Julio hurtling on a journey to uncover their
true meaning. Austral tracks Julio's trip from Aliza's home in an Argentine artists' colony to
a forgotten city in Guatemala to the Peruvian Amazon and through Nueva Germania the
antisemitic commune in Paraguay founded by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.A story of mourning and
return-to one's native country to one's darkest memories to oneself-Carlos Fonseca's Austral
interrogates the obsessions and upheavals faced by survivors of a rapidly globalizing world. A
treasure map of intertwined experiences each cleaving its own path through time the novel is
a fascinating investigation into the disappearance of culture and memory and a charting of the
furthest limits of what language can do. With this remarkable exploration of the traces we
leave behind those we erase and how we seek to rebuild Carlos Fonseca confirms his status as
one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Latin American literature.
