Ernesto Mestre-Reed, Andrea Yaryura Clark & David Unger: A Conversation

Andrea Yaryura Clark grew up in Argentina amid the political violence of the 1970s until her family moved to North America. After completing her university studies, she returned to Buenos Aires to reconnect with her roots. She followed with interest the stories then emerging about the children of the “disappeared” – the youngest victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship in the ‘70s – who were coming of age and grappling with the fates of their families. She conducted numerous interviews documenting their stories, which inspired her debut work of historical fiction, On a Night of a Thousand Stars: A Novel (Grand Central Publishing). The story starts in New York in 1998. Santiago Larrea is a wealthy Argentine diplomat living in a seemingly perfect world. But a cryptic comment made by an old acquaintance from his university days sparks his daughter Paloma’s curiosity about his past, of which she knows little. When the family travels to Buenos Aires for Larrea’s United Nations ambassadorial appointment, Paloma is determined to learn more about his life in the years leading up to the military dictatorship of 1976 and Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Her search sets in motion a chain of events that leads her to question her family and her identity – and also puts her life in danger.

David Unger is the Guatemalan-born translator of Mr. President, and has received Guatemala’s Miguel Ángel Asturias National Literature Prize for Lifetime Achievement. He is also the author of several novels, including The Mastermind, The Price of Escape: A Novel, and Life in the Damn Tropics: A Novel, and he has translated more than a dozen books from Spanish into English. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Guernica, and Bomb Magazine. In Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias’ Mr. President (Penguin Classics), the egomaniacal dictator of an unnamed country schemes to dispose of a political adversary and maintain his grip on power. As tyranny takes hold, everyone is forced to choose between compromise and death. The book was inspired by Asturias’ life under the regime of President Manuel Estrada Cabrera of Guatemala, where it was banned for many years. Infused with exuberant lyricism, Mayan symbolism, and Guatemalan vernacular, it is at once a surrealist masterpiece, a blade-sharp satire of totalitarianism, and a gripping portrait of psychological terror.

Ernesto Mestre-Reed was born in Guantánamo, Cuba. He is the author of the novels The Lazarus Rumba and The Second Death of Única Aveyano. A Guggenheim fiction fellow and a MacDowell fellow, he has also translated many novels from Spanish, including Laura Esquivel’s Malinche. Sacrificio: A Novel (Soho Press) is set in Cuba in 1998. Rafa, an Afro-Cuban orphan, moves to Havana with nothing to his name and lands a job at a café. He soon falls into a web of entanglements with his boss’ son, the charismatic Renato, leader of the counterrevolutionary group “Los Injected Ones,” which is planning a violent overthrow of the Castro government during Pope John Paul II’s upcoming visit. When Renato goes missing, Rafa’s search takes him from an AIDS sanatorium and tourist hotels to the outskirts of Havana. There he enters a slum cobbled together from the city’s detritus by Los Injected Ones. Sacrificio captures the fury, passion, fatalism, and grim humor of young lives lived at the margins of a society they desperately wish to change.