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Crocodiles at Night<\/span><\/i> is a book of many titles. Its main character, an autofictional stand-in for the author, proposes several options for the novel she is struggling to write: \u201cThe Devoured One,\u201d \u201cLatitude Penance,\u201d \u201cThe Passion According to GH\u201d (a fitting nod to Clarice Lispector), and \u201cImperfect Present,\u201d which reflects the same obsession with verb tense that Heffes revealed in her all-conditional <\/span>Ischia<\/span><\/i>. A couple of other title ideas come to mind. One is \u201cMedical Humanities,\u201d an academic discipline that shows through in the book, and which would capture its effort \u201cto extract what is human from the medical odyssey.\u201d Another, perhaps ironically, is \u201cVisualizing Loss in Latin America\u201d: the title of a different book by Heffes, this one not a novel but a scholarly analysis of Latin American art, film, and literature through the lens of ecocriticism. Albeit in different terms, <\/span>Crocodiles at Night<\/span><\/i> also paints a portrait of loss\u2014another of Heffes\u2019 obsessions. Here, she endeavors \u201cto write grief. To write degradation. To chronicle those steps that illness takes to prey on its victims. To honor the victim describing the penance. A penance that robs a person\u2019s will. That takes away everything.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nThe plot is simple: an Argentine academic living in the United States returns to Buenos Aires to be with her ailing father as he convalesces in hospital after an operation. Everything else is decidedly more complex. If I had to choose one adjective to describe <\/span>Crocodiles at Night<\/span><\/i>, I might go with \u201coneiric.\u201d The book opens with the question \u201cWhat about nightmares?\u201d From that point on, we can read this novel as a sort of documented dream, a stream of subconsciousness in which time dilates and contracts and the reader is always at least one step removed from reality. The world Heffes depicts in <\/span>Crocodiles at Night <\/span><\/i>is familiar but sinister, menacingly artificial, like the way a dream feels when you realize you\u2019re dreaming but can\u2019t quite manage to wake up. In this sense, whether intentionally or not, this is a rather Lynchian novel; all the more so as Heffes (or, rather, her stand-in) describes her hospitalized father\u2019s real-world surroundings as a \u201cstage set\u201d built around him.<\/span><\/p>\n Similarly Lynchian is the author\/narrator\u2019s self-conscious fragmentation into multiple characters, each of whom seems to be living through and writing about a different version of the same experience. We know the author is named Gisela Heffes, yet we are told to imagine the main character\u2019s name is not \u201cGisela Guerenstein\u201d but \u201cVera Heffes.\u201d We hold in our hands a Russian doll of autofiction, with one stand-in inventing another until the lack of a cohesive identity becomes the whole point: \u201cWho is she, Vera? And who is she, the one who\u2019s writing? Will they all be the same at one time?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This fragmentation of the self emerges not only from the book\u2019s point of view, but also from its setting. Returning to Buenos Aires after years in the United States makes the main character feel like a foreigner in her own hometown, \u201cas if the relationship between memory and reality had been interrupted.\u201d Indeed, when we return to a place after a long time away, it can feel as though either the place or ourselves were not entirely real, as though our memory and the present were mutually exclusive.<\/span><\/p>\n As in <\/span>Ischia<\/span><\/i>\u2014which, as I mentioned, is written entirely in the conditional tense\u2014Heffes relies heavily on verb tense and mood throughout <\/span>Crocodiles at Night <\/span><\/i>to create an atmosphere of dreamlike ambiguity. The words that most characterize the narrative, to my mind, are \u201cwould,\u201d \u201ccould,\u201d \u201cmight,\u201d and \u201cperhaps.\u201d This air of conditionality means the book, besides being about loss, is also about its own writing process. We get glimpses inside the \u201cNotebook\u201d in which \u201cVera\u201d is preparing what will presumably become the novel we are reading, and we learn how, rather than writing in any programmatic way, she \u201cjots down fragments and outlines on her iPhone,\u201d ending up with a \u201cconstellation of scattered fragments.\u201d The author, like her stand-in, appears plagued by self-doubt and prone to self-diagnosis, afraid the sought-after novel will end up a hodgepodge of \u201cinconclusive narrations\u201d and \u201cincoherent fragments.\u201d Appropriately, the finished novel\u2019s fragmentary nature is indeed its most remarkable feature.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe hold in our hands a Russian doll of autofiction, with one stand-in inventing another until the lack of a cohesive identity becomes the whole point.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As an eminently autobiographical novel, <\/span>Crocodiles at Night <\/span><\/i>also opens a window onto its author\u2019s scholarly interests. Heffes is an ecocritic as well as a novelist, and the former role shines through in <\/span>Crocodiles at Night<\/span><\/i> as the frail father\u2019s body becomes a metaphorical stand-in for the urban environment of Buenos Aires. The narrator\u2019s graphic depictions of medical procedures are reminiscent of the descriptions of waste and extraction we find in <\/span>Visualizing Loss in Latin America<\/span><\/i>, as nurses \u201cextract cloths and gauze from the depths of his pale skin and collect filth from deep inside.\u201d As her father\u2019s body deteriorates, often in scatological terms, Buenos Aires (her erstwhile \u201cpatria\u201d or \u201cfatherland\u201d) is characterized by \u201cwaste, trash, filth.\u201d While interesting in principle, the father-as-city metaphor is sometimes heavy-handed, such as when \u201cthe transverse wound that bisects her father\u2019s abdomen\u201d is likened to \u201ca Buenos Aires that is fractured between reality and memory.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Last but certainly not least, I\u2019ll address the meticulous translation achieved by Grady C. Wray, a former professor and translation mentor of mine at the University of Oklahoma. Grady has been translating Gisela Heffes for over a decade now, and his style of translation is a perfect match for her style of writing. Both could be described, especially in this novel, as \u201cclinical.\u201d Grady is an uncommonly exacting translator who focuses intently on the constituent parts of every phrase, sentence, and paragraph, making a diligent effort to capture every ounce of the original\u2019s meaning. The finished product is an admirably thorough translation, and one that hews sometimes uncomfortably close to the source text, privileging the semantic over the aesthetic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Without sinking too far into translation jargon, Grady \u201cforeignizes\u201d rather than \u201cdomesticating\u201d as he translates, not because he seeks to maintain so-called \u201clocal flavor\u201d (which, in fact, he seldom does), but rather because he is unafraid to write in English in a way that may sound idiosyncratic or unnatural as long as the precise meaning of the Spanish is preserved. For instance, he writes, \u201cShe lets herself get carried away by the expected Buenos Aires itineraries,\u201d reproducing each noun, verb, and adjective of the Spanish with precise equivalents or cognates rather than straying from the original in favor of a more predictable alternative for the English-language reader. For a book marked by separation from reality, where writing about the world supersedes the very world being written about, this approach to translation is just as it should be.<\/span><\/p>\n