La vida endeble / The Fragile Life

Description

Winner of the 2017 Amado Nervo Short Novel Prize, this book by Mauricio Carrera brings together a range of figures who are now part of the history of art, literature, and journalism. The photographers Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, the writers Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, as well as Alfonso Reyes, are guided by a doctor named Arturo Díaz Vigil, a minor character from Under the Volcano, who serves as a Virgil illuminating the path of memory against the oblivion that darkens all that remains unnamed. In The Fragile Life, the author brings these and other protagonists, including George Orwell and Josie Herbst, into reflections on suffering, success, and survival through the lenses of masculinity and femininity. The story is framed by the bullets of the Spanish Civil War and the nostalgia of Reyes in a Cuernavaca haunted by the ghostly presence and alcohol-soaked love of Malcolm Lowry. The Fragile Life is a compelling novel about widely different characters brought together by a war fought in the trenches of language, love, and thought.