Miembro fantasma (2026) is the latest book from Fernanda Trías, a Uruguayan writer based in Colombia and two-time winner of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for her novels Mugre rosa (translated by Heather Cleary as Pink Slime) and El monte de las furias (forthcoming in English translation as The Mountain Woman, also by Heather Cleary). The many awards she has earned for her work as a novelist, as well as the fact that her books have been translated, situates her in a place of prominence and worldwide resonance alongside a select group of other Latin American women writers, such as Mariana Enriquez, Mónica Ojeda, Liliana Colanzi, Agustina Bazterrica, Samanta Schweblin, and Dolores Reyes, among others. In the twenty-first century thus far, these writers have stood out for the power of their stories and for their ability to build their own styles, resisting all classification. They have made an impact through the variety of their literary endeavors, which Argentine critic Florencia Garramuño synthesizes into the verbs “decenter,” “rupture,” and “excavate.”
What is a phantom limb, as the title of Trías’s new book might be rendered in English? It is the “presence” of the absence of an amputated body part. Those who have lost an arm or a foot say they can still feel physical sensations from the absent limb: pain, numbness, tingling. The image of the phantom limb is present in the story that gives this book of stories its name. Yes, there is a physical amputated foot belonging to the narrator’s mother, but the idea of the phantom takes shape as an allegory for memory, trauma, and a deep wound. The story presents a monodialogue at a bar, in the freezing cold setting of a country in the far north. We only hear one side of this conversation, from an interlocutor who tells of his childhood experiences in the time of state terrorism carried out by Uruguay’s dictatorship in the seventies. The story gradually reveals what it was like to be a child and grow up in a neighborhood where he, his parents, their neighbors, and a girl with a black doll suffered absences, exiles, disappearances, home invasions, and more. For a long time, his mother refused to speak of this past. The narrator says of his father, “He believed in truth. I just believed in revenge.” That which can no longer be seen remains. The wound lives on within these characters like a phantom limb. The narrator searches for a culprit, investigates, and digs through archives. Here, the verbs “rupture” and “excavate” fit in sync. Revenge will become possible.
Feminist writer Rebecca Solnit wrote an interesting book called Men Explain Things to Me, in which she tells how, at a social gathering, a man asked her what she did for work and she answered that she had just published a book on the photographer Eadweard Muybridge. The man interrupted her, and boastfully, with an air of superiority, told her about an important book that was recently published about the same figure. Without letting her speak, he summarized and explained the book, which he only knew through a review he had read, as if he were a major expert on the subject. At first, she wondered if she had failed to cite some important source. But, in the end, another woman clarified to the man in question that the book he was talking about was precisely the one that Solnit had just published. The man reacted with confusion and shame. This led Solnit to explore this social pattern that leads many men to doubt what women know, to ignore what they say, to not listen, and to take on patronizing or condescending attitudes. Solnit says: “The presumption […] trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported confidence.” This can have the effect of silencing women, and this silence comes to the fore in the story “Intimidad irremplazable.” A woman is cornered in her own house: “She went up to the writing desk in her room. This was her workplace. Her husband had a study, though he never used it and the room just gathered dust. So why didn’t he give it over to her? […] But then again, what was she doing that was important enough to merit a study?” This story’s solitude and alcohol, its immersive silencing, its domestic routine, a project preparing electric bicycles for the city abandoned due to an argument with her husband, and the thought that “it wouldn’t have worked anyway, it was crazy to think she could have pulled off something like that on her own” all remind us of Solnit’s essay. That being said, the story takes a special turn when the protagonist forms an unusual relationship with a little hatchling sparrow, abandoned by its mother in a nest on her windowsill. Her secret bond with this fragile creature moves something within her.
Illness, old age, and closeness to death are explored in the stories “Ciclón” and “Una mujer de su época.” The former delves into the blocked-out memories of childhood and the denial both of a forbidden first love and of sexual awakening; the latter outlines the memory of a whole life’s worth of failed romantic relationships, with both men and women, in contrast to the indifferent present embodied in a stray dog seen through a hospital window. The animal is here and now; memory is a string of frustrations. The return to the present, alongside a hospital roommate, suggests one way of letting it all go.
“Personaje en construcción,” “Grupo de foco,” and “Última carta a Claudia” are playful metafictional experiments put together in surprising ways. The mise-en-scene of writers whose lives intertwine through the act of telling stories or through what seems to be a writing workshop gives rise to innovative structures. By turning the writer into a fictional character, Trías explores different facets of literary creativity. Humor and pain come together in these stories, and we even catch a wink to another woman writer with whom the author is close.
In “El orador” and “Si el mundo parara de hacer lo que hace,” addictions become ways to escape from absences and wounds. These stories explore different forms of dementia and wounds from the past. Clinics house pitiful, hopeless characters, like those of “El orador”: “They shuffled away, dragging their feet; they really seemed very mistreated by life. Their pants sagged, their hair was white and invariably long, with a halo of pink, shiny skin at the back of the head, that part they would never see in the mirror, and their hands were rigid as birds’ beaks.” The orator in the former story and the boss in the latter are disturbing parodies of the powerful. In these stories, the world is not a safe place either inside or outside the clinic. For the narrator and main character of “Si el mundo parara de hacer lo que hace,” the memory of the attack on the Twin Towers is linked to memories of abuse.
This unsafe world appears in other forms in “De frontera solo aire,” which shows us various different ways in which death is trivialized. The story takes place during the pandemic. It opens with a murder to which passers-by are indifferent—one woman jumps over the dead body—but that becomes an object of obsession for the narrator, who cannot get the image out of her mind. The only ones obsessed with the image of the dead body are herself and the dog she gets in order to get out of the house during lockdown. Her partner and a friend remain uninterested. Shootings are part of their life. The narrator remembers various stories of the ashes of the dead in strange situations, with a tinge of dark humor. Urban violence becomes part of the everyday landscape and the story ends with yet another murder.
Miembro fantasma is inhabited by characters immersed in solitude and affected by past traumas; they are the residents of an uncertain world. Its biting humor, inner exploration, and unexpected endings keep the reader on tenterhooks. In these stories, the traumatic past becomes the phantom limb of the present.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
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