Contemporary Authors

1. Affections https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004896 Hasbún, Rodrigo, 1981- author. Afectos. English Affections / Rodrigo Hasbún ; translated by Sophie Hughes. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2017. pages cm PQ7822.H37 A4413 2017 ISBN: 9781501154799 (hardback)9781501154805 (trade paperback)

• The White Review - http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-rodrigo-hasbun/

  Interview with Rodrigo Hasbún

  Rodrigo Hasbún (born Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1981) has published two novels and a collection of short stories; he was selected by the 2007 Hay Festival as one of the Bogotá 39, and in 2010 was listed by Granta as one of the twenty best writers in Spanish under the age of 35. Two of his stories have been made into films for which he co-wrote the screenplays. Affections, his second novel, will be translated into ten languages.

  Affections is inspired by the eccentric Ertl family, the head of which, Hans, was Rommel’s personal photographer and cameraman in Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda movies. After Germany’s defeat in the Second World War, the family migrates to Bolivia, a move that will lead them to grow apart. In Hasbún’s polyphonic narrative, whose short chapters are narrated by strikingly different voices, he reveals the feelings and perspectives of the three estranged Ertl sisters – Heidi, Trixi and Monika – and the people most affected by them. The second half of the novel recounts the fallout of Bolivia’s guerrilla war through the eldest daughter Monika’s Marxist radicalisation and her participation in the Ejercito de Liberación Nacional de Bolivia. In real life, Monika would go down in history as ‘Che’s avenger’. Affections also imagines the circumstances in which this young woman killed Bolivia’s ambassador in Germany: the man who ordered the amputation of Che Guevara’s hands as proof of his death.

  When, as his English translator, I queried Hasbún about some of the biographical details in Affections, the author, in the laconic but charged phrasing that characterises his fiction, seemed to suggest that the only true-to-life elements that matter to him as its writer are those that the characters themselves believe to be true. In the novel, which asserts its strict basis in fiction in the front matter, details as incidental as made-up place names are plucked directly from the real Hans Ertl’s diary, uncorrected. Why? It seems that for Hasbún the fictions we create around ourselves, especially those fossilised in our private writings, or even born out of that intimate writing process, represent the other side of truth, or to borrow J. M. Coetzee’s lovely temporally fluid noun, truth-directedness. A desire to represent truth-directedness is evident in all Hasbún’s work; in his characters, self is a site of flux. Monika, his devastating guerrilla heroine, confronts herself in the mirror: ‘That’s you now, you think, that woman on the other side is you.’

  The hazy line between fact and fiction comes up again and again in Hasbún’s writing, as in the story ‘Syracuse’, where a creative writing teacher sets his students an assignment to write an authentic diary, but one in which any number of the events or details they recount is fabricated. This seems a fitting metaphor for the growing body of work by an author who has admitted to holding onto well over a decade’s worth of personal diaries; these, for Hasbún, are ‘a place of literary exploration’.

  This interview came about thanks, in part, to another prolific diarist: the late, much missed Argentinian writer and literary critic Ricardo Piglia (1941-2017), whose final literature courses Enea Zaramella took as part of his doctorate at Princeton University, and who Rodrigo has mentioned in several of our correspondences. Piglia’s recently published diaries have helped revive an interest in life writing in Latin America, and seemingly reinforced Hasbún’s interest in the genre. The two men got in touch, and a conversation developed over email.

  —S.H.
  QTHE WHITE REVIEW — A Bolivian of Palestinian descent living in the United States. Displacement, exile, geo-politics, cosmopolitanism. It may seem obvious, but it’s also true that having left a place, it can be difficult to go back. What is your experience as a foreigner and/or citizen of the world? What is your notion of home?

  ARODRIGO HASBÚN — I like the displaced position of the foreigner, whose mere presence rejigs the map. His or her affects and loyalties and sense of belonging don’t respond or correlate to a single setting – she or he is both there and not there, in more than one place at a time – and I find this liminal quality pleasing, fruitful even, although it’s also true that it leaves you somewhat in the air, unsure of where or what home is.

  I’ve been lucky enough to live in several different cities (in Cochabamba and Barcelona, Ithaca and Santiago, Toronto and Houston), but the last thing I consider myself is a citizen of the world. Not only do I dislike the expression – who can aspire to be one, and who cannot? How is that possibility defined? By whom? – but being a citizen of the world couldn’t be further from my own circumstances as someone who travels with a Bolivian passport and an Arab face. And yet, this is really a gripe about the expression, not my personal situation, for which I am incredibly grateful, knowing full well how regressive and how brutal things are for most migrants. Despite the endless form-filling and paper-shuffling and the occasional grilling at border control, I’m one of those that have it easy, who don’t find themselves forced to get on a life raft or cross the desert on foot to arrive (if they’re lucky) at their destination.
  QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Congratulations are in order, Doctor Hasbún. It’s sometimes said that academic writing can encumber creativity or fiction writing. And yet, both vocations involve writing professionally, albeit in different ways. What are your relationships with academic and fiction writing like? How do you ensure your two worlds don’t interfere with one another?

  ARODRIGO HASBÚN — At first I was worried that doing the PhD would come at the expense of being a writer, that I’d become too conscious of what I was doing. But it’s a baseless dilemma; a bit like the soccer player who spends his free time reading books on the history of the game. I don’t believe this makes him any better or worse later when he’s on the pitch with the ball at his feet. By this I mean that, beyond the seminars and often fascinating conversations that academia generates, in my case writing continues to exist or come about in that strange zone where you don’t understand what’s at play, nor why you make the decisions you make, and where the most critical details are out of your hands. They’re somewhat instinctive.

  But I do think I’ve transformed as a reader. In fact, that’s what the doctorate has meant above all: learning to read more carefully, and from different, sometimes opposing perspectives. Every writer is his or her own first reader, and this way of reading improves one’s writing, makes it more multifaceted and rigorous. On the other hand, there is the risk of finding yourself writing to fulfil certain critical or theoretical expectations, sort of preempting how this thing you’ve written will be read. Either way, the fact that in the last few years dozens of Latin American writers have opted to do PhDs may well leave a mark – both good and bad – on the literature that is produced.

  QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Could you tell me a little about the main themes of your research and doctoral thesis?

  ARODRIGO HASBÚN — In my thesis I recover the personal diary, a genre that has generally been overlooked in Latin America. Through readings of three diaries I really admire (La tentación del fracaso by Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Ese hombre y otros papeles personales by Rodolfo Walsh and Veneno de escorpión azul by Gonzalo Millán) I question some of the prejudices implicit in their reception: namely that the expectation is for diaries to be testimonial as opposed to literary, and that this kind of writing is considered minor.

  Ribeyro wrote his diary over roughly forty years, Walsh over fifteen, and Millán devoted the last months of his life almost exclusively to writing his. This in itself is telling. It’s a kind of writing inextricably linked to the experience of time, a kind of writing forged against the quotidian and a life perpetually slipping away from us. I’m both intrigued and amazed by the urgency created by this; this attempt to fasten or fix things that are movable or fluid; to preserve what has already been lost, or eventually will be. I’m also seduced by the fact that it’s a genre that shows no deference to the literary institution or publishing world. The diarist writes with her back turned on both, and happily so.

  QTHE WHITE REVIEW — I can’t help but think of Ricardo Piglia, the Argentinian writer and literary critic (who I was lucky enough to have as a teacher), whose writing and thinking somehow relates to what you’ve just described. Firstly, in terms of reading: it may well be a shame that we can no longer read without a pencil in hand (correct me if this doesn’t apply to you), but, in some way, Piglia advises us to take the act of reading seriously; or rather, he constantly questions what it means to ‘know how to read’. Secondly, regarding intimate writing, Piglia’s own diaries – Diarios de Emilio Renzi – have been published to great acclaim over the last years by Anagrama. What did you make of them?

  ARODRIGO HASBÚN — What a treat to have had Piglia as a teacher. In addition to being an extraordinary writer, he was one of the most singular critics in the Spanish-speaking world. I began reading him when I was eighteen, and like so many others, I’ve been really intrigued about his diary since then. So you can imagine my delight when the first part was published in 2015. Beyond how much it moved me, I’m interested in the complex artifact that Piglia created with this first volume (and indeed the second, which has subsequently been published). It’s a diary that constantly asks itself what a diary is or might be, and it brims with life and poignant prose. If La tentación del fracaso marks the beginning of a period of maturity for the diary as a genre in Latin America, Diarios de Emilio Renzi, twenty-five years later, marks the end of that period in some way. These two diaries share many features: they’re extensive, incredibly self-reflective, and both went through drastic edits decades later at the hands of their writers. There’s almost a declaration of principles implicit in this act; an explicit desire to embed the diary in the literary realm.

  QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Autobiographies, diaries, correspondence: these are all genres that oblige the writer to select particular events, construct character (in this case, one’s own), and imagine a possible reader. If we can agree that all these elements combine to form one genre – life-writing – we might say a very subtle game is at play between reality and fiction (which may well be a single place). I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this aporia (if we can call it that), and also how the life-writing genre relates to history, or with your concept of history. Is it, for example, a genre that lends itself as a documental or historical source?

  ARODRIGO HASBÚN — I’m less interested in the documental potential of this kind of writing than in its literary aspect. In the auto/bio/graphical field, too much importance has been placed on the second element (the bios, or life), and the complex alchemy of the three together is almost never dealt with. Looking out, at others, is not the same as looking in at yourself, and if this gaze is a written one, the result is even more porous, because both the tactics and resistances involved when a person tries to portray themselves come into play: the things that they can’t see, or don’t want to see, or don’t know how to see in themselves and everything around them; their conscious or unconscious willingness to show themselves in a certain light. That’s why I don’t read diaries or autobiographies or correspondences looking for truths. If these texts are a kind of stage where we witness the construction of a self-image, if we see in them someone trying on different masks or disguises, it’s not so much the masks or disguises that interest me as the very act of that person trying them on.

  QTHE WHITE REVIEW — And your recent novel Affections points to this, is that right?

  ARODRIGO HASBÚN — Yes, it’s true, in Affections there are characters trying on different masks and disguises throughout the novel. They’re searching for themselves the whole time, and the changes they go through are quite drastic. I suppose the same thing can be said of all of us. We take a while to become ourselves, to accept who we are or can be.

  QTHE WHITE REVIEW — How did you go about developing your cast of characters, in Affections? I call them ‘yours’, but they are also ‘ours’ in the sense that they already belong to the history books. I imagine you had to rely on some sort of preliminary research (documentary, photographic, life-writing) to begin to visualise them before they could begin to have a voice. Perhaps the right question is: what was the process – the ‘historical process’ or the literary one – to turn something that belongs to all of us into something of your own?

  ARODRIGO HASBÚN — I looked at and read as much as I could for six or seven months, not entirely sure what I’d do with my notes, or where the novel would go. There isn’t all that much material available on the Ertl family, and I think that this was crucial, because it let me write with considerably more freedom than I’d initially thought possible. It’s true that I had some solid facts to hold onto, and that I knew I should get them into the story, but other than that it was the same old ambiguity that every new text brings. I was interested in exploring the mundane side of the family, the day-to-day life on which I’d found almost nothing in my research. So I had to make it all up, from Trixi’s first cigarette with her mother, to Monika’s wedding night. For the kind of writer I am, these small details are just as relevant as the great deeds and adventures the Ertls undertook. That’s why I focused just as much on the things that would definitely be in a biography, as on the things that wouldn’t; on both the visible details and the hidden ones; on both their exploits and escapades and their inner journeys. Needless to say, all of their portraits are imbued with fictional ambiguities. I’m not trying to convince anyone that their lives were actually like this. Ideally, I’m trying to convince readers that this is an interesting way to write about them.

  QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Speaking of masks and mimicry, how did you envision or conceive of gender or the issue of the female voice in this novel? Is this a sensibility that comes from life-writing?

  ARODRIGO HASBÚN — Traditionally there was a kind of division of space according to gender, wasn’t there? Penelope stays at home waiting for Odysseus to return from gallivanting around the world. In Affections, Aurelia, the mother, more or less obeys these norms. But the daughters rebel, and time and again they cross the domestic threshold and break from supposedly ‘female’ roles. They come and go as they please, and they also pay little attention to their father’s way of seeing things, to the tales that he tells. Following this logic, I wrote the novel from the girls’ perspectives, rather than from Hans’s.

  And then, as you say, there is also the question of intimacy, which I’m really interested in. But I don’t think about this intimacy in terms of gender so much as a proximity to what’s being narrated. I want to be close to my characters, to understand their dilemmas and frustrations, their vulnerabilities. I want to know what makes them tick.

  QTHE WHITE REVIEW — More congratulations are in order for your recent and forthcoming translations of Los afectos. How have you found the translation process? Do you tend to get very involved? What kinds of ‘liberties’ – if any – do you allow those who translate your words for other cultural or linguistic contexts?

  ARODRIGO HASBÚN — Translators are the invisible heroes and heroines of literature, the ones who truly keep it alive. I think we could stop writing (there is already so much written, and we know so little of it), as long as we carried on translating. As for the process itself, in my experience, the writer becomes a co-pilot: you relinquish the steering wheel of that car (that has given you so much joy and grief) and become the co-pilot at a new driver’s side. The one choosing the words now, the one battling it out with language, sentence by sentence, is the translator, and the resulting book is as much theirs as yours. I’m very obsessive, a real stickler for detail, and can spend days adding and deleting a single word, so it’s taken me some time to learn to accept my role as a collaborator. As for the other translations you mention, I only speak Spanish and English, so Affections is the only translation that I’ve actually read.

  QTHE WHITE REVIEW — Finally, what are you working on at the moment? Do you have any new projects in the pipeline?
  ARODRIGO HASBÚN — This last year was given up almost entirely to finishing the thesis. The moment I was free of it, some months ago, I immediately started working on a new project. I’m still not entirely sure what it is, but I’m very much in it, watching how things slowly take shape, how they find their right place. Whenever I’m writing something, I feel everything starts sending me signals: an anecdote on the radio, something I spot in the street, a joke my mum tells me over the phone. All of a sudden there’s nothing that doesn’t affect what I’m writing in some way. It’s a really wonderful state to be in. I just hope it lasts long enough for me to come out of it with a new book.

  *

  This interview was selected for inclusion in the 2017 Translation Issue by Daniel Medin, a contributing editor of The White Review. He is Associate Director for the Center for Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris, and an editor for The Cahiers Series and Music & Literature.

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  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR
  ENEA ZARAMELLA researches and writes about sound, soundscapes and Latin American literature as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Warwick and Teaching Fellow at Leicester University. He is working on a book entitled The Analogic Era: Listening Practices and Cultural Production in Latin America (1890-1963).

  Rodrigo Hasbún (Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1981) has published two novels and a collection of short stories; he was selected by the 2007 Hay Festival as one of the Bogotá 39, and in 2010 was listed by Granta as one of the twenty best writers in Spanish under the age of 35. Two of his stories have been made into films for which he co-wrote the screenplays. Affections is his second novel and will be translated into ten languages.

  Sophie Hughes is the English translator of Rodrigo Hasbún’s novel Affections (Pushkin Press, June 2016; Simon & Schuster, September 2017).

  THIS ARTICLE IS AN ONLINE EXCLUSIVE FROM MARCH 2017.

• The Book People - https://www.bookpeople.com/event/rodrigo-hasb%C3%BAn-affections

  ABOUT RODRIGO HASBÚN

  Rodrigo Hasbún is a Bolivian novelist living and working in Houston. In 2007, he was selected by the Hay Festival as one of the best Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine for Bogotá39, and in 2010 he was named one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists. He is the author of a previous novel and a collection of short stories, two of which have been made into films, and his work has appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Affections received an English PEN Award and has been published in twelve languages.

• Brooklyn Book Festival - http://www.brooklynbookfestival.org/authors/rodrigo-hasbun/

  Rodrigo Hasbún
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  Rodrigo Hasbún is a Bolivian novelist of Palestinian descent whose works include Affections, the book of short stories Cinco and the novel El Lugar del Cuerpo. In 2007, he was selected by the Hay Festival as one of the best Latin American writers under the age of 39 for Bogotá39, and in 2010, he was named one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists. Two collections of his short stories have been made into films, and his work has appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Affections received an English PEN Award and has been published in twelve languages.
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• Pushkin Press - https://www.pushkinpress.com/author/rodrigo-hasbun/

  Rodrigo Hasbún is a Bolivian writer born in 1981. He has published two novels and a collection of short stories; he was selected by the 2007 Hay Festival as one of the Bogotá 39, and in 2010 was listed by Granta as one of the twenty best writers in Spanish under the age of 35. Two of his stories have been made into films, for which he co-wrote the screenplays. Affections is his second novel and will be published in ten languages.

• Granta - https://granta.com/contributor/rodrigo-hasbun/

  Rodrigo Hasbún
  Born in Cochabmaba, Hasbún has published the book of short stories Cinco (2006) and the novel El lugar del cuerpo (2007). Awarded the Latin Union Prize for the Most Original Spanish American Short Fiction, he was part of the issue that Zoetrope: All-Story dedicated to emerging Latin American fiction. His writing has been included in various anthologies and two of this stories have been made into films, for which he also co-wrote the screenplays. He lives in Ithaca, New York. In 2011, Duomo Ediciones will publish Los dias más felices, his second collection of short stories.

Hasbun, Rodrigo: AFFECTIONS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hasbun, Rodrigo AFFECTIONS Simon & Schuster (Adult Fiction) $23.00 9, 12 ISBN: 978-1-5011-5479-9
A German family heads to Bolivia after World War II, sparking decades of internal strife amid political revolution.Hasbun's brisk, sensitive U.S. debut is a fictionalized story of the Ertl clan, which emigrated to escape the ruins and political embarrassments of Nazism. (Patriarch Hans worked as an assistant to propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.) But Hans' dream of exploring a new land absent politics slowly erodes. Central to that shift is his daughter Monika, who, after a failed marriage, joins Che Guevara's revolutionaries; "she felt that she had at last found her place in the world." Her decision, and the violence that follows it, creates a blast radius around the rest of the family, especially her sisters, Trixi and Heidi. But though Hasbun's narrative is rooted in politics, its key strengths are his remarkable command of time and characterization. The novel is short but gallops across a half-century's worth of transformations in Bolivia, and sections narrated by individual characters are marked by a surprising depth of emotional detail given the story's brevity. Reinhard, the brother of Monika's husband, can't reconcile "the intriguing Monika from the early days with the impossible Monika later on." Heidi describes the disoriented family as like "soldiers searching for a war, or interplanetary beings," while Trixi laments the "doses of horror" that Monika's radicalization created; Monika herself hardens over time, becoming someone with "no emotion, no memory." More detail about each of these characters would be welcome; the book feels at times like an epic historical saga that's been cut down to size by an especially aggressive editor. But in stripping down the story to its barest essence, Hasbun has intensified the effects of each individual scene; the volumes' worth of drama contained in the family's life emerge by suggestion and implication. A one-sitting tale of fragmented relationships with a broad scope, delivered with grace and power.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hasbun, Rodrigo: AFFECTIONS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572840/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&
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Rodrigo Hasbun
New Internationalist.
.498 (Dec. 2016): p41. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 New Internationalist http://www.newint.org
Full Text:
Affections is the deft and entrancing second novel from prizewinning Bolivian author Rodrigo Hasbun. Fleeing post-War Germany, eccentric explorer and cameraman Hans Ertl and his family set off in search of Paititi, the legendary Inca city hidden deep in the Amazonian rainforest. What follows is an intriguing and moving tale of quest, of family relationships and of politics, as the eldest daughter, Monika, joins the leftwing guerrillas and avenges the killing of Che Guevara. Based on true events in Bolivian history, it is a short and utterly captivating read, creating a powerful atmosphere that lingers and deepens. Hasbun is definitely a talent to look out for.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] STAR RATING
***** EXCELLENT **** VERY GOOD *** GOOD ** FAIR * POOR
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rodrigo Hasbun." New Internationalist, Dec. 2016, p. 41. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A470870675/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=3062bff5. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470870675
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Affections
Jonathan Fullmer
Booklist.
113.22 (Aug. 1, 2017): p34. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Affections. By Rodrigo Hasbun. Tr. by Sophie Hughes. Sept. 2017.150p. Simon & Schuster, $23 (9781501154799).
In his English-language debut, Bolivian novelist Hasbun weaves together a fictional tale about a real-life family struggling to find stability in a world of shifting ideologies and relationships. In the aftermath of WWII, the Ertls emigrate from Germany to Bolivia, settling in La Paz, where they live in relative bliss. That is, until the family patriarch, Hans, once the cameraman for a Nazi filmmaker, sets out with a video camera and two of his three daughters to find the lost Amazonian city of Paititi. They fail, and when they return home, the family's disintegration is underway. Hans' ambitious daughter Monika falls in with Che Guevara's Marxist guerrillas, quickly rising up the ranks. Lovestruck Heidi just wants to marry and return to Munich. Trixi, the youngest, appears to be following in the fateful steps of their sickly mother, a heavy smoker who dies early. The story unfolds through the perspectives of Hans' daughters and other narrators, spanning more than a decade at a quick pace which belies the fact that Hasbun writes with patience and precision, revealing the family's most intimate thoughts and interactions: first smokes, blind love, and familial devotion. This is a novel to savor for its richness and grace and its historical and political scope.--Jonathan Fullmer
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fullmer, Jonathan. "Affections." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2017, p. 34. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501718805/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=32c56775. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501718805
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Affections
Publishers Weekly.
264.30 (July 24, 2017): p36. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: Affections
Rodrigo Hasbun, trans, from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes. Simon & Schuster, $23 (144p) ISBN 978-1-5011-5479-9
The Ertl family produced two infamous members whose lives are fictionalized in Hasbun's moody and spare novel. Hans Ertl was a famous Nazi cinematographer exiled to Bolivia after World War II, where he became obsessed with finding the Lost City of Paititi. His eldest daughter, Monika, who accompanied him on an expedition to find the mythological land, married into a wealthy family before becoming radicalized, joining the Marxist revolutionary movement, and becoming a guerilla fighter. All of this is known as fact, but through his measured and oddly ethereal writing (reminiscent somewhat of Paulo Coelho), Hasbun creates a sort of double exposure of the Ertl family's slow demise over the upheaval roiling through South America. The impact of Hans's restlessness on his family--his three daughters and their mother--frames the narrative, which unfolds through multiple points of view. Somehow, it is Trixi, the sister who stayed behind with her mother while the rest of the family sought Paititi, whose staid narrative provides the most powerful moments: from her unhappy, cancerous mother deliberately introducing her to cigarettes at age 12, to the devastating paragraph in which Monika corrects Trixi's naive belief that her older sister's lover died accidentally: "They kicked his spine until it snapped." This is an inventive, powerful novel. (Sept.)
Caption: Rodrigo Hasbun's Affections is a spare and moody novel about the family ofa
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cinematographer who shot Nazi propaganda films (reviewed on this page).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Affections." Publishers Weekly, 24 July 2017, p. 36. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500133685/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=04579503. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500133685
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"Hasbun, Rodrigo: AFFECTIONS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572840/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d45e6331. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018. "Rodrigo Hasbun." New Internationalist, Dec. 2016, p. 41. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A470870675/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=3062bff5. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018. Fullmer, Jonathan. "Affections." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2017, p. 34. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501718805/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=32c56775. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018. "Affections." Publishers Weekly, 24 July 2017, p. 36. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500133685/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=04579503. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/translation-tuesdays-by-asymptote-journal/2016/sep/06/translation-tuesday-affections-by-rodrigo-hasbun-extract
  Word count: 3466

  Translation Tuesday: Affections by Rodrigo Hasbún – extract

  In this excerpt from the Bolivian author’s tale of a family breakdown in 1960s South America, a woman considers the nature of her unhappy, alienating marriage

  By Rodrigo Hasbún and Sophie Hughes for Translation Tuesdays by Asymptote, part of the Guardian Books Network

  Rodrigo Hasbún

  Tue 6 Sep 2016 11.00 EDT
  Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 07.26 EST
  ‘“My wife,” you hear him say, and you hate the way those words reduce you.’
  ‘“My wife,” you hear him say, and you hate the way those words reduce you.’ Photograph: Nancy Beijersbergen / Alamy/Alamy

  You marry a man with the same name as your father and this doesn’t amuse you. Your father isn’t there to shake his hand or to hug you, to offer you up with these gestures to the man who will take his place. At your own wedding, at least for a couple of seconds, you feel like the loneliest woman in the world. All women must feel this at their weddings, you think, in an effort to console or merely entertain yourself, or perhaps to do both things at once. Trixi is the only one there with you. That afternoon your family has reduced itself to her alone, and there’s something heartbreaking about this basic realization, but also something incomprehensibly liberating. Until recently, you thought that you would never do it, that marriage wasn’t for you. Months after meeting him, perhaps believing in the promise of a different life, one unremarkable Saturday you get married.

  * * *

  On the wedding night he can’t get an erection. You see him naked for the first time: his sinuous body, his long, slim dick, the scar from his peritonitis operation, and feel not a hint of excitement or conviction. Is this a typical wedding night? He touches you all over with his soft, rich kid’s hands. He licks your nipples and neck, kisses you clumsily either in desperation or impatience, perhaps fearing you or himself, but he can’t get an erection, not even when you stroke his dick. You wonder whether he might still be a virgin, whether perhaps he’s only ever been with whores, whether it isn’t women he’s into at all, whether he, like you, doesn’t understand why he got married. You wonder what your parents’ wedding night must have been like—it’s always been beyond you to imagine them young. You think about how your children won’t be able to imagine you. “You’re distracted,” your husband says. He’s a silent man, he knows how to look at himself from a distance. It’s the thing you most admire in him, perhaps the only thing you admire. Despite what you always believed, it’s something you have forgotten how to do. You feel too close to yourself, and from there everything looks blurred. “No,” you tell him, “I’m not.”
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  * * *

  Trixi helps you move your clothes and belongings and to arrange them in the space your husband has made for you. Your husband: strange to say and strange to think it, but that is what you call him in your head, because he shares his first name with your father, and that is stranger still. Your sister only has two more years of school to go. She is no longer a little girl and has turned into a nervous creature, beset by tics. It occurs to you that she would be very easy to sum up: she’s an oddball. Is this her way of escaping the things that upset her? Her way of defending herself from what she doesn’t understand or might hurt her? And is entering into marriage with a rich kid with soft hands your way? Would you also fit into a single phrase: the one who got married to escape? Escape from what? Hadn’t you had relatively happy lives, at least up until a year ago when your mother’s health really began to deteriorate? Is it from that irrevocable deterioration and outcome that you’re trying to escape through marriage? Or from the distance that’s grown between you and your father? And why won’t you call a truce now that you’re settling your things into a new room, supposedly at the start of something, the tentative start of a different life? You tell Trixi about your wedding night. She just laughs. “I don’t know what to say,” she says, and you realize she is more naive than you thought. It does you good talking to her. Her presence does you good. You ask if she’s seeing anyone (she shakes her head), if she has any idea what she’ll do after school (“I’ve still got two years to go!” she laughs), if she has heard anything from Heidi or Papa (she shakes her head). Hours later you hug goodbye at the gate. “Poor thing, how will you ever get used to such luxury?” she teases. Walking the thirty metres back to the front door takes you don’t know how long. As you walk, you imagine the house as a prison.

  At your own wedding, at least for a couple of seconds, you feel like the loneliest woman in the world.

  Despite having done everything in your power to avoid it, you will live for a time with your parents-in-law. His father is a cordial man, his mother offhand. She takes every opportunity to show you she disapproves of her son’s choice, that she hoped for someone different for him, someone more refined and submissive, less ungrateful. You’ve already riffled through their bedroom, the storeroom, living room and kitchen, but nowhere did you find anything remarkable. The house and the lives of those who inhabit it lack any mystery at all. You, on the other hand, hold on to just a few mementos from your past life: the expedition diaries, some old letters, no more than ten photos, and that’s it. You avoid going through them. The last thing you want is to get stuck on places that no longer exist, and the photos and diaries and letters are themselves reminders that they don’t. Better to hide them, perhaps you should even get rid of them. That would be the most logical and appropriate thing to do, the thing that would help release you from it all. You don’t do it, however, because you still can’t bring yourself to. In the evenings, after interminable meals with his parents, you tell your husband that the situation makes you uncomfortable and that you should start looking for a house together at once. “What situation?” he asks as if he hasn’t noticed, searching out your body under the sheets, fondling your nipples, your neck and hands, arousing neither you nor himself, and promptly giving up to think about something else—his whores, his homosexuality, his work. “This situation,” you say. “We didn’t get married to go on being children.”

  Because it behoves you living in such a poor country, because you can’t stand being in the house with his parents, because some days are too far from what you imagined for your life, you decide to set up a shelter for the needy with Lilota. You’ve known her since your first day at school in La Paz (when you couldn’t speak more than twenty words of Spanish it was she who kept your head above water), and you’ve been friends ever since, for five years now, although at times you think you don’t know the first thing about each other. Lilota is still unmarried and gets fatter by the day, neither of which things seems to bother her. She’s excited at the prospect of starting up a project like this together. Your mother-in-law and her friends are experts in all things charitable and give you advice. How is it that these miserable old women go to such efforts to help other people? you ask yourself as you listen to them. What moves them to such shows of solidarity if in their day-to-day existence the only thing that seems to concern them is their own comfort? Is it, in fact, nothing but show? In the following weeks, you meet with businessmen and traders, bankers and lawyers, all German or the children of Germans, and you pull together eighteen thousand dollars, including the five thousand your husband throws in. You’re surprised by your own powers of persuasion, and delight in taking charge thanks to your determination, two months later the shelter is up and running. Was this what becoming an adult was? Taking decisions and responsibility for the things you do or stop doing? Was being an adult assuming that there is no longer a family for you to worry about, that what matters lies ahead of you not behind? At twenty-one, can you call yourself an adult? At twenty-one, can you feel that living, when all’s said and done, means belonging to yourself, and that everything that came before was a kind of dream? Why try to forget it if it was a reasonably happy dream?

  You meander through the city before and after your meetings with Lilota and the engineer who is helping to renovate some of the rooms in the old mansion. They’re usually two- to three-hour walks (you’re fascinated by the steep little streets, the colonial passageways frozen in time, the ups and downs of La Paz: they make your heart pound, reminding you that it’s there). But once or twice you’ve walked for even longer, like a rat trapped in a maze, or a madwoman, or, again, like a prisoner, only this time locked in the city, not the house. You tell yourself that it’s in your blood, this trait of not being able to stay still, and find yourself wondering what else you carry in there. Another thing that’s started to happen: increasingly you feel that your life can fit into a single sentence, or at least a few. You are the beautiful girl who entered into the bonds of marriage with a rich kid who hardly knows her. You are the housewife without a house, the unfeeling wife, the one who devotes herself to helping others with a friend from school to escape the guilt and the boredom, and to forget about her husband’s frequent trips away (does he go directly to the mines, or does he have a secret life, a life that might explain his incompetence and apathy?). You are the fine young thing the businessmen try to seduce, the self-assured sibling who sees one of her sisters every once in a while and has lost all contact with the other, the one she never really got along with. You are the motherless daughter who never stops thinking about her father, half of the time hating him profoundly, and the other half admiring and loving him unconditionally. You are the woman who speaks to the people who turn up at the shelter, who is interested in what they have to say, who is weighed down by their stories, even though they tend to be quiet types, men and women who vanish as silently as they appear. You are the woman who remains a stranger to herself. The ex-depressive, the quasi-Bolivian. A pitiful sum, whichever way you look at it.

  Something finally happens, at one of the German Club Sunday luncheons, to break the tedium: Reinhard, your husband’s long-lost brother, turns up. He has an air of the family about him, but his features are more delicate and there’s something almost childlike in his gestures that makes him even more attractive. At first, everyone is cordial with him, acting as if they saw him every week. Your husband introduces you. “My wife,” you hear him say, and you hate the way those words reduce you. You hold out your hand and tell him your name. It’s an awkward situation, above all because he wasn’t there at the wedding, and you don’t know if that’s because he wasn’t invited or because he couldn’t be bothered. Your husband never talks about him. “Another time,” he replied on the one occasion you asked why you hadn’t met him. You didn’t push him for more answers—something that irritated you when he did it. Over lunch the conversation becomes heated the minute they begin to talk politics. Reinhard is critical of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement and its methods. He says it’s not enough to give land to the Indians, and less meaningful still to let them vote (“Vote for whom?” he asks, when your husband challenges him, “Vote for which of the little white men exploiting them?”). He tells us it’s brewing, that those of us present should hold on to our hats and our wallets, should be trembling in our boots. You’ve never heard anyone speak like this before, his words unsettle you. You feel dizzy suddenly and at the table they take it as a sign that at last you’re pregnant. You know you can’t be, but don’t contradict them. “I’d like to go home,” is all you say. In the car your husband doesn’t stop moaning. “Pretty easy, isn’t it, to be a communist when your family’s rolling in money,” he says. “Not too hard in those circumstances. I mean, in those circumstances, who wouldn’t?” He doesn’t once ask how you are.

  Three days later, tall and slim, energetic, handsome, your brother-in-law turns up at the old mansion. The shelter had come up in the argument at the German Club, his mother insisting that this was the way to do something: by doing it, not just talking about the need to do it. “There are people who actually do things for others,” his mother had said, using you as one example, herself as another. Alongside his studies, Reinhard works part time in a hospital a few blocks away from the shelter and he wants you to know that you can count on him for anything, now or in the future. There’s nothing defiant in his attitude, just a willingness to help. More than once he says you should tell his brother and parents if it makes you feel more comfortable. You ask him if he’d like to take a look around the facilities and he accepts with an interest you’ve never felt from your husband. As you tell him about the project, you realize you’re proud of what you’ve achieved up until now, excited by all that’s left to be done. Reinhard listens attentively, occasionally asking questions. He asks the people at the shelter things too, and even examines one of them, telling him to come and find him in the hospital where he could do a proper consultation. How is it possible that he’s your husband’s brother? you ask yourself. How is it possible you don’t recognize either of them in the other? Half an hour later he says goodbye, offering you his hand, not the kiss you would have expected, the kiss you were waiting for, the kiss everyone gives each other in this country.
  Translation Tuesday: two nonfiction works by Roberto Merino
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  Shortly after, you receive a letter from your father in West Berlin. He is still upset by the fact that you got married without his consent. “People don’t marry so young these days,” he writes in a messy, angry scrawl. “Monika, where did the adventuress go?” he asks (and how it cuts to see him call you by your name). Where did you hide the person who made him so proud? Where did you leave the woman who could have conquered the world, who was destined for great things? What did you do with the most gifted of his daughters? “I expected more from you,” he signs off and you read the sentence several times, convincing yourself that it really is there on the page. You respond with a few lines explaining that phantom fathers don’t get a say in the fates of their children, and that this is what he had always been, that if he didn’t know the first thing about anything, better to say nothing at all. It’s just gone ten-twenty and your husband is asleep at your side. In the morning he’ll leave again for the mines. You’ve been living together for half a year and are still strangers, and neither of you seems able to fix that. The promise of a different life continues to be nothing but a promise. Is it your father’s words that have brought all this on? Minutes later, you tear up both of your letters and throw them in the toilet. Back in bed, as tends to happen, you end up thinking about the expedition. You think about your mother too, about how cruel he was to her, the rumours about him and Burgl, his and Burgl’s betrayal, and all of this brings you back around to the side of hate. Were they already lovers when you met her? Looking back, were there signs that gave their affair away? You go over what memories you still hold but don’t come to any conclusions. Yet it’s the very possibility of your ignorance, the loathsome credulity that prevented you from seeing beyond what you had in front of you that infuriates you more than anything that might have been going on. You could reread the diaries, look at the photos more closely. It was a decisive period, your time in the rainforest. You didn’t find anything, never got to Paitití, but at the same time you found too much, every one of you. Without even going very far your father found Burgl and Heidi her Rudi. And you, what did you find? Hours later, with that question still roving in circles above your head—“And you? And you? And you?”—your husband stirs at your side. You close your eyes and lie still, pretending to sleep. He takes a shower, gets dressed and leaves.

  Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes

  Click here for more information about the book.

  *****

  Rodrigo Hasbún is a Bolivian novelist of Palestinian descent born in 1981. He is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories. His work recently appeared in the Latin American issue of McSweeney’s, edited by Daniel Galera. Affections is his second novel and will be published in 10 languages.
  Sophie Hughes is a literary translator and editor living in Mexico City. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote, PEN Atlas, and the White Review. Apart from Rodrigo Hasbún’s Affections, she has translated Iván Repila’s novel The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse and Laia Jufresa’s Umami.

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• The Literary Review
  http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-affections-by-rodrigo-hasbun/
  Word count: 980

  A Review of Affections by Rodrigo Hasbún

  Elizabeth Jaeger
  Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes
  (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2017)

  Politics, or perhaps I should say differing ideologies, divide families. I know this well since it has been years since I have spoken to my cousin and her family. If you ask them why we are not speaking, their answer will invariably tell a different story than mine. I tried once to reach out, to step beyond the wounds of my past, but their memories of the event were colored by time, or maybe perception. No one ever wants to be the bad guy. We all want to play on the side of righteousness and find ourselves on the correct side of history. Regardless of the reason, or who was at fault, the rift has never been mended, and lately, with the flames of political discontent raging in America, I wonder if distance is for the best. Our views on most issues have become more polarized, and it’s not likely we’d find an amicable way to agree to disagree. Families are funny that way. Branches sprung from the same trunk can turn out almost nothing alike. But unlike trees, people aren’t rooted to one spot, and so life’s circumstances undoubtedly affect the men and women they become.

  Affectations, by Rodrigo Hasbún, splendidly explores the changing dynamics of one particular family in Bolivia during the time of Che Guevara. The family, native to Munich, settles in La Paz shortly after World War II, hoping to start a new life. The brilliance of this novel is rooted in its narrative, which is told from multiple perspectives, including the three sisters (Monika, Heidi and Trixie) and Monika’s ex-lover, Reinhard. Though many voices are heard, by the end of the third chapter it is apparent that the novel will revolve around Monika. What we learn about everyone else is almost always in relation to her.

  Monika is restless and discontent, and according to Heidi, she is prone to panic attacks and fits of hysteria. She is the type of person who can’t be ignored. Passionate and driven, she knows how to make things happen, although the things that happen aren’t necessarily good. Reinhard, reminiscing about her, declares, “Yep, if you pressed me I would say this is the definition of her that sticks: the woman who went on to cause so much hurt.” What she did and why becomes clear as the narrative unfolds.

  Trixie, who at one point felt a close kinship with her sister, is most sympathetic towards her. Like Reinhard, she identifies Monika as the source of incredible pain. But she also wonders how things might have unfolded if circumstances had been different. After all, it is after a personal tragedy that Monika commits herself to the National Liberation Army, which Guevara founded. To escape the discontent of her personal life, she becomes embroiled in the revolutionary doctrine and makes herself invaluable to the Army, choosing what’s best for the rebels over everything else. In the end, Trixie – who despite everything still cares about Monika – refuses to move until she finds her and convinces her to start over. However, when she can’t locate her, she mournfully concedes, “It’s not true that our memory is a safe place. In there too, things get distorted and lost. In there too, we end up turning away from the people we love the most.”

  Monika’s political leanings also alienate her father, Hans, with whom she was once quite close. Successful in his new life, Hans refuses take part in his daughter’s militant plans, nor does he approve of her support for such extreme and revolutionary ideologies. Despite his insistence on not getting involved, his life is turned upside down when his oldest daughter goes too far, stepping beyond the bounds of what he, and the government, believe is appropriate. He suffers greatly, first economically and then emotionally. In the end, his desire to save face outweighs his desire to outwardly concern himself with his daughter’s whereabouts. According to Trixi,

  He said he’d experienced something similar after the war, that they’d already made him feel like an outcast once, that back then they’d closed one door after another to him, but this time he wouldn’t move an inch.

  Unlike Monika, Trixie never felt compelled to follow politics. It didn’t concern her and so she didn’t get involved. Yet, her love for Monika, her desire to know where her sister has disappeared to and what has become of her, motivates her to obsessively read newspapers and listen to the radio. She explains, “I had never been interested in politics, and there I was learning all sorts of things that deep down I still didn’t care about. I cared about my sister.” Monika’s actions and her political involvement shatter relationships, and those most hurt are the ones who loved her best.

  Monika is an unforgettable and vivid character who lives on in memory long after completing the book. Her energy and vivacity are captivating, making the novel an alluring and gratifying read. Rodrigo Hasbún is a remarkable and sensitive storyteller and in Affections he has crafted a haunting yet enchanting tale.

  | | |

  Elizabeth Jaeger’s work has been published in Brush Talks, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Peacock Journal, Boston Accent Lit, Damfino, Inside the Bell Jar, Blue Planet Journal, Italian Americana, Yellow Chair Review, Drowing Gull, Icarus Down Review, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Atticus Review, and Literary Explorer. She has published book reviews in TLR Online and has participated in an episode of No, YOU Tell It!

• Words without Borders
  https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/a-tale-of-displacement-and-dissolution-rodrigo-hasbuns-affections
  Word count: 1551

  Book Reviews
  from the September 2017 issue
  A Tale of Displacement and Dissolution: Rodrigo Hasbún’s “Affections”
  Reviewed by David Varno
  Image of A Tale of Displacement and Dissolution: Rodrigo Hasbún’s “Affections”

  Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes
  Simon & Schuster, September 12, 2017

  Is it ever possible to leave the past behind and restart one’s life? Is there any value to nostalgia? Why do those who are absent sometimes retain the greatest hold on our affections? In this short, fragmentary novel of a family’s displacement and dissolution, Bolivian author Rodrigo Hasbún explores these questions through a story in which private lives intersect with the convulsions of war, revolution, and political struggle.

  Hasbún’s book is a fictional account of the life of Hans Ertl and his family. Ertl was a German cinematographer and mountaineer whose work as a cameraman and photographer made him an important figure in the Nazi propaganda machine. He worked with Leni Riefenstahl in some of her movies, including Olympia, and was well-known for his war photography. After the war ended, however, Ertl was unable to find work because of his reputation as “Hitler’s photographer.” He decided to move and went to La Paz with his family in the 1950s. There, he kept away from politics and dedicated himself to documentaries and photography, later becoming a farmer. He died in 2000 at the age of ninety-two. A Time magazine article from 2008 includes claims by one of his surviving daughters that he was never a Nazi himself, but “did what he could do to survive.”

  Hasbún does not portray his fictional Hans as a Nazi, nor does he attempt to redeem (or apologize for) Ertl’s past associations. Instead, the novel employs minimal historical and biographical details in order to imagine how a displaced father’s traits as an obsessive documentarian would ripple and mutate in his children, and to explore the psychological drama underneath the characters’ shifting relationships over time.

  Affections is composed of short chapters narrated by different characters. The story takes distinct angles and registers through the voices of each of Hans’s three daughters: Heidi, Monika, and Trixie. Two men from outside the family, both Monika’s lovers, also take part in these narrative variations. The many narrators bring the book a range of emotional weather as they work through the past with shifting tones: reflection, empathy, self-interrogation, and longing.

  Hasbún makes frequent use of the language of cinema and photography to show Hans’s impact on those around him. The family is often captured by Hans's cameras, made to participate in staged scenes for his documentary, and Heidi begins to see her family as characters in a dramatic film, while Monika struggles to break away from the family and see herself clearly: “You feel too close to yourself,” she writes in the second person, “and from there everything looks blurred.” The collaborative portrait that emerges of the central character remains somewhat ambiguous, as if he were forever out of reach. Some questions, Hasbún seems to suggest, will always remain unanswered.

  The tone is not entirely melancholic, however. The first and longest chapter, narrated by Heidi, launches us on an epic adventure, as Hans decides to film a documentary about the ruins of the lost Inca city of Paititi, said to lie somewhere in the Amazon jungle. Initially, he had counted on involvement from a Brazilian institute and a team of archaeologists, but when they pull out, he decides to pursue the project on his own. He has something of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo: courageous and determined, but also irrational, constantly misled, devoid of support and blind to everything but his desire to fulfill his project.

  Heidi tells the story of the ill-fated expedition from a point much later in time, when she is back in Europe and rid of her childhood illusions, but Hasbún succeeds in balancing her bitterness with the breath of youthful life, dramatizing the adventure in a way that is infectious and allows us to recognize Hans’s persuasiveness. Without a team behind him, he accepts help from his two oldest daughters, along with two associates from Germany. As the team’s situation grows more dangerous and uncertain as they descend the Andes into the fog-shrouded rainforest, Heidi’s account takes on a dreamlike quality, rendered beautifully by translator Sophie Hughes: “We looked like lost parachutists. We looked like soldiers searching for a war, or interplanetary beings. Every now and then the fog lifted and we could see the hills rolling out toward the east, covered by a carpet of trees that stretched out endlessly.”

  Hans’s search for the lost city is purportedly of “noble” intent, in the sense that he is not out for gold or riches, only to confirm and document the existence of the ruins. Heidi says that she “shivered with excitement at [Hans’s] gallantry” while he haggles with their mule drivers over the terms of the journey. The word also indicates his Quixotic nature as a self-appointed explorer. For all his gallantry, however, Hans seems at times to be oblivious to the world he is exploring. He claims that Machu Picchu sat unknown for hundreds of years until it was discovered by Hiram Bingham, even though it had remained familiar to indigenous people. He is also reckless and destructive when it comes to serving his vision. At one point, he instructs his daughters to douse a valley in combustible oil and set it ablaze, for no other reason than to catch their escape on film. The fire destroys the hired workers’ lodgings and pointlessly kills animals and plants. The Ertls almost lose their own supply tent in the process.

  Physical destruction echoes the emotional damage in the family, which Hasbún considers in greater detail. Monika, the oldest daughter, succumbs to a plague of panic attacks following the move to La Paz, a move she heavily protested with the claim that “there’s no such thing as starting over.” When she volunteers to join the expedition, the gesture is ironic and yet fitting. Not only is there no such thing as starting over, there is no giving up. Her father brought her to Bolivia, and she will take the journey as far as possible, even into the jungle to join Che Guevara’s guerrilla fighters.

  Monika’s revolutionary consciousness is partly triggered by an affair with her brother-in-law Reinhard, who encourages her to recognize the failures of the country’s 1960s-era junta and invites her to meetings with strikers, but it isn’t long before Monika embraces more radical measures. Reinhard’s account of their past together is filtered by heartache, as he equates the violence she perpetrates with her ruthlessness as a lover: “Yes, if you pressed me I would say this is the definition of her that sticks: the woman who went on to cause so much hurt.”

  In the second part of the book we meet another of her lovers, a guerrilla fighter named Inti who escaped capture by crossing enemy lines yet is haunted by dreams of a barrage of bullets, as well as memories of his fallen brother. As he looks around at the surviving men he led to safety, he observes how “the world had gone on, an overwhelming fact to digest . . . dead men no longer afraid of death.”

  These passages on the guerrilla war are brief but dense, and Hasbún manages to trace a looping connection between Hans and Guevara’s failed quests, to the point that Monika is driven to complete an audacious solo mission that will brand her as a terrorist in Bolivia and make her father an outcast all over again.

  When the book advances in time to show the family’s dissolution and the aftermath of guerrilla warfare, the youngest daughter Trixie wonders if it could be possible for Monika to start a new life—but this way of thinking is of course antithetical to her sister’s. Trixie is desperate to hold onto some evidence of a worthwhile life, something to redeem the past and affirm the present, but the old photographs in their father’s house are just evidence of destruction and dissolution. As time goes on, her nostalgia grows foggier, she loses touch of reality, and her narration nearly veers across the line between natural human contradiction and sheer incoherence. She responds to news of the guerillas with a willful lack of comprehension, though the reason is that she’s worried about her sister. While the ending brings an abrupt resolution to her account of a near-mental breakdown, her desire to break the family’s destructive cycle without losing her past resonates long after the conclusion of this short but powerful novel.
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  David Varno

  David Varno is a former Dispatches Editor for Words Without Borders and has contributed to Electric Literature, Tin House, the Brooklyn Rail, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Paste, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.

  More about David Varno

• The Scotsman
  https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-affections-by-rodrigo-hasbun-1-4187347
  Word count: 782

  Book review: Affections, by Rodrigo Hasbún Rodrigo Hasbun Rodrigo Hasbun Allan Massie Published: 09:55 Wednesday 27 July 2016 Share this article Sign Up To Our Daily Newsletter 0 Have your say Hans Ertl was the director of photography for Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia. Though never a member of the Nazi Party, he also worked as the official photographer for Marshal Rommel and the Afrika Korps. After the war he was blacklisted in Germany and in 1950 he emigrated with his wife and three daughters to South America, first to Chile and then Bolivia. There he made documentary films, one about the search for a lost Inca city, and then bought a farm where he would live until he died in his nineties. The oldest daughter, Monika, was his favourite, working with him on his documentaries. She married another German exile, a dull businessman. Oppressed by the poverty and social inequalities of Bolivia, she founded an orphanage and was then drawn into radical politics. Adoring and hero-worshipping Che Guevara, she became a guerrilla fighter or terrorist and later his avenger. Her commitment separated her from the father she had loved. She was killed in an ambush by the security forces. The two other sisters led more normal lives, Heidi returning to Germany where she became a successful businesswoman, the youngest,Trixi, remaining unhappily in Bolivia. This is tremendous material for a novel, dramatic and full of moral complexity. No wonder the young Bolivian novelist Rodrigo Hasbún was attracted to it. What is remarkable, however, is what he has made of it. The easy option, which someone less talented and original might have taken, would have been to write a political thriller. All the material is here in waiting for such a book that, well done, would have sold in airports worldwide. Nazi background, exotic locations, Che Guevara, police brutality, a beautiful and idealistic assassin; altogether a rich stew. Maybe somebody will still write that novel, heavily weighted with research, and it will be a big success.Hasbún’s success is of a different order. He has written a spare narrative, little more than a novella in length, in short, impressionistic chapters, spoken through the voices of Monika (addressing herself as “you”), the other daughters, the brother-in-law who loved her too late and lost her, and an unidentified narrative voice. Everything in the drama is here counterpointed with the ordinariness of life in a land where you don’t feel at home and yet seek to belong. The title indicates where his interest lies. Affections is the theme, affections not strong enough to hold a family together. The father is presented as a “phantom”; you’re always aware of him and he is always slipping out of sight. Monika is a mystery. What turns a beautiful, intelligent girl, so close to her father, into an activist, terrorist and assassin? Events and the reflections they give rise to are presented to us, now in memory, now in a shifting present. But things get “distorted and lost in memory.” “It’s not true,” Trixi thinks, “that memory is a safe place.” “We end up,” she says, ”turning away from the people we love the most.” She does so painfully and reluctantly. The middle sister, Heidi, does so determinedly. But actions have consequences for other people. You get blamed for what you aren’t yourself responsible for. Trixi comes to the sad conclusion that “knowing how to be alone was my one great achievement in life”. Or perhaps that’s not so sad, but a sort of success. Hasbún is a writer who invites you to look at the other side of the coin. This is a finely atmospheric book, admirably translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes. It’s a work of sympathetic imagination, written with cool economy, elegance and understanding. It’s a reconstruction of real lives, real historical events, but Hasbún’s achievement is to make it perfectly fictional, which is to say truer than fact. I read it straight through first, with no idea of its historical truth, no knowledge of Hans Ertl beyond the name, no memory of the woman who in Hamburg assassinated the Bolivian diplomat who had been the policeman who ordered the hands of the dead Che Guevara be cut off. Learning of this made the second reading interesting in a different way, but didn’t enrich it. The truth of fiction of this quality is that it reminds you how much of life that really matters goes on in the mind and heart. . Affections by Rodrigo Hasbún, Pushkin Press, 142pp, £9.99

  Read more at: https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-affections-by-rodrigo-hasbun-1-4187347

• World Literature Today
  https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2018/january/affections-rodrigo-hasbun
  Word count: 445

  Affections by Rodrigo Hasbún
  FICTION
  Author:
  Rodrigo Hasbún
  Translator:
  Sophie Hughes

  The cover to Affections by Rodrigo HasbúnNew York. Simon & Schuster. 2017. 132 pages.

  In this compact and evocative historical novel, a filmmaker flees from the scene of the twentieth century’s greatest crime, only to find his family enmeshed in a deadly struggle on another continent. A skilled cameraman, Hans Ertl was a key member of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda unit, but when World War II ended, he was rendered a pariah in his native Germany. Now Hans, his wife, Aurelia, and their three daughters are trying to start anew in Bolivia.

  Affections, Rodrigo Hasbún’s second novel, is told in stylistically varied chapters narrated by a half-dozen characters, several of whom—the Ertls among them—are based on real-life figures. Though the book’s medley of voices begets a couple of jarring transitions, it provides Hasbún with a host of angles from which to examine broad societal shifts and brief, intimate moments in the lives of his ensemble cast.

  As the story starts, it’s the mid-1950s and Hans has decided to make a documentary about his search for a fabled Incan paradise. Hans, in Hasbún’s telling, is uncompromising, and his first expedition divides the Ertls into distinct factions. As Monika and Heidi accompany their father on his trek deep into the rain forest, youngest sibling Trixi stays behind and has long talks with the disillusioned Aurelia. “She told me to be suspicious of anyone in too much of a hurry to get where they want to be,” Trixi recalls.

  Hasbún is attuned to each of his characters’ motivations and doubts, but Monika, the eldest of the Ertl sisters, proves to be the novel’s principal force. Troubled by the plight of Bolivia’s poor, she opens a shelter and immerses herself in leftist politics. In the mid-1960s, she falls in with a Che Guevara–led guerilla army and becomes a committed revolutionary. When her comrades are felled by government troops, Monika opts for increasingly radical tactics. In spy-thriller fashion, she eventually finds herself standing on a busy avenue, cradling “a small satchel with a Colt Cobra hidden in its false lining.”

  A Bolivian writer who lives in Houston, Hasbún has crafted an intriguing tale that ably bridges a pair of indelible historical moments. Lots of novels plumb the intersection of the personal and the political, but few have this kind of intellectual heft and emotional subtlety.

  Kevin Canfield
  New York

• The National
  https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/book-review-affections-is-the-story-of-a-family-stalked-by-darkness-1.207619
  Word count: 1066

  Book review: Affections is the story of a family stalked by darkness

  Rodrigo Hasbun's book is an evocative, compelling account of Nazi propagandist Hans Ertl's flight to South America and the fate of his family.
  Hans Ertl, Nazi cinematographer and photographer, made his home in Bolivia where he died in 2000. Piero Pomponi / Getty Images.
  Hans Ertl, Nazi cinematographer and photographer, made his home in Bolivia where he died in 2000. Piero Pomponi / Getty Images.

  Hans Ertl was a German cinematographer who made his name working with Leni Riefenstahl on the propaganda films she made for Hitler in the 1930s. Olympia (1938), for example, their documentary about the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, once famous for showcasing then-groundbreaking cinematic technique, is now infamous for its glorification of Aryan athletic supremacy.

  Such was Ertl’s reputation with the Nazi elite, when war broke out in 1939 he was conscripted into the military as a war correspondent, famously earning the title of “Rommel’s photographer” for his documentation of the field marshal’s North Africa campaign.

  After the war, with the country and the party he’d spent his career lionising now defeated, Ertl was banned from working in Germany. Along with many of his contemporaries, he fled to South America to begin a new life. He and his family – his wife, and their three daughters: Monika, Heidi and Trixi – arrived in La Paz in 1952.

  He shot two final documentaries in Bolivia in the 1950s before his career was brought to an abrupt end in 1961 when mid-filming a new project, he lost his footage in an accident.

  Retiring to an isolated farm, he stepped back from the limelight only for his eldest daughter Monika to take centre stage instead. In 1969 she joined the guerrillas fighting in Che Guevara’s National Liberation Army of Bolivia, soon becoming the most wanted woman in Latin America after she assassinated Toto Quintanilla, the man supposedly responsible for cutting off Guevara’s hands after his execution. She was hunted down and killed in 1973.

  Faced with such riches to mine, a less daring writer would surely produce a doorstop of a family saga. Rodrigo Hasbún, however, boldly strips his narrative right back, and, in a writerly intrepidness that matches the adventurous spirit of both Ertl and Monika, constructs a haunting account of the family’s Bolivian years, the key to which is an elegant sparseness.

  Rather than retelling the facts of their extraordinary public history, Hasbún is concerned with an intimate examination of the slow collapse of the family as experienced from within: a sister who became a “mystery”, a father who was always a “phantom”.

  The story of which he pieces together through vignette-like chapters: a series of episodic moments spanning a period of more than 20 years and narrated from multiple perspectives.

  Slight, mercurial and more than a little strange, Affections is like a rare bird of paradise; the kind of creature one imagines Ertl and his companions encountering during the expedition deep into the Amazon jungle with which Hasbún begins the story.

  Filming the first of his two Bolivian-set documentaries, Ertl sets out in search of the lost legendary Inca city of Paitití (the Lost City of Gold); Monika and Heidi accompanying him, along with the man Heidi will eventually marry, and the woman who will become Ertl’s lover.

  Wearing strange “green rainforest suits,” they push through the thick fog tracing the footsteps of the Conquistadores of yore: “We looked like lost skydivers. We looked like soldiers searching for a war, interplanetary beings.”

  It’s an experience that is formative for each and everyone involved – even little Trixi, who is left at home with her mother – a journey into the interior, both physically and psychologically, that lays the groundwork for so much of what’s to come.

  Beautifully translated by Sophie Hughes, Affections is a richly atmospheric and evocative portrait of fractured familial bonds that takes the reader into the darkness where the protagonists dwell.

  “It’s not true that our memory is a safe place,” thinks the adult Trixi. “In there, too, things get distorted and lost.

  In there, too, we end up turning away from the people we love the most.”

  Lucy Scholes is a freelance reviewer based in London.
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• The New Inquiry
  https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/the-novel-refuses/
  Word count: 2310

  The Novel Refuses
  By Aaron BadySeptember 23, 2017

  Rodrigo Hasbún’s Affections is a very short novel, the story of an ex-Nazi and his family trying to lose themselves in Bolivia. But because it repeatedly refuses to become the book you expect it to be—and because it lives in this moment of refusal, and never stops being a novel that refuses to be the novel you think it will be—that brevity makes it a lot easier to give it the re-reading that it both needs and deserves. I say that, because this is a novel that doesn’t end when it finishes: I started re-reading the early sections before I’d even finished the novel, and I strongly recommend this way of approaching its twelve interconnected vignettes. The novel’s short chapters feel more like paintings than prose: rather than read them end-to-end as a singular interconnected narrative, you watch them like the sort of movie that you rewind and freeze-frame. Or perhaps like a movie divided up into youtube clips.

  I first got lost in this book because of the gentle complexity of Hasbún’s writing (which Sophie Hughes has outdone herself in translating); his sentences are clear and simple and direct, but they have a way of turning over on themselves, of changing into something else even while you are still reading them. Like his characters, the writing tends to be suspended between multiple timelines and perspectives, layered, overlapping, and emulsive; a recollection of the past will turn into an anticipation of the future and a psychologically revealing detail will suddenly turn out to be seen from and filtered through the perspective someone else.

  Anyway, I have rarely read a novel so gently and quietly concerned with adding two and two and getting five, in fact, of making it possible to read the same sentence twice and see two different things. At first, I thought this was just because Hasbún is a very good writer—which he is—but it isn’t just that: to tell a story about a person is to freeze them in place, but to live the story that is told about you, to move forward in time from the image into which you were frozen, like a word being italicized—it does something to render that story a mere fiction, false and inadequate. And if telling stories is a form of control over reality—which it is—then living in a world made by stories is all about finding the places where the story doesn’t fit, where the lives we are sentenced to break apart and become something else. This novel is about that: Affections is not a story about lives, in the end; it’s about how people live in a world constructed by stories, how they make those stories, and how they are lost in them.

  Let me confess: I am overthinking this novel. I am putting things into it that aren’t necessarily there on the page, grasping for a theoretical frame that would connect the dots in a novel that leaves these dots defiantly disconnected. But it’s the sort of novel that forces you to do that: by declining to tell a complete story—and by refusing to settle into a secure and stable narrative form—it leaves the reader with nothing to do but prowl around in the margins of the story, reading into the gaps that are left by the stories left untold and extending outwards into the stories that begin, are suggested, but the dots left unconnected. This is what happens when stories end, but time goes on.

  Hasbún began writing this novel, as he recently told Scott Esposito, when he heard the story of Hans Ertl, from a friend, over beers; the friend had been writing the biography of Klaus Barbie—a Gestapo torturer who secretly lived in Bolivia for decades, before being extradited in 1983—and Hasbún had been fantasizing about writing a novel in which Barbie would be a character. You don’t have to ask why one would write a novel about such a person; a Nazi torturer, living in secret in the Americas… the story writes itself, comes alive, takes over. So much so, in fact, that many reviews of Affections refer to the novel that they had expected it to be, when they first heard a rough description: The Financial Times observes that “another writer might have exploited [this theme] more wordily,” for example, and The Scotsman can’t help but notice that “the easy option, which someone less talented and original might have taken, would have been to write a political thriller.” “A less daring writer would surely produce a doorstop of a family saga,” observes The National. And so on; a frequent refrain in the reviews is the sense that “another writer might have exploited [the material] more wordily,” that writing more would have filled in the “overall interconnectedness” of the material, which Hasbún has left “teasingly unresolved.”

  In these reviews, we find some of the stories that are present in Affections, some of the novels it doesn’t become. It could have been a political thriller or a family saga, a genre piece or a “doorstop”; it almost should have been, since we feel the subtle force of those stories in the interpretive pressure they exert on the novel. But Hasbún didn’t write those novels, because he didn’t write about Klaus Barbie. Instead, he was drawn to the much more enigmatic figure of Hans Ertl, a similar figure whose life is harder to summarize, if only because it kept going on. Barbie’s story is a three-act play, a gestapo torturer who fled and was caught. Done. But while Ertle’s life has some parallels with Barbie’s, those differences are key. Ertle had been Leni Riefenstahl’s cameraman for the 1936 Olympics, and had helped to film Rommel’s North African campaign, and—like Barbie, with whom he was friends—he took the “La Ruta de la Ratas” from Germany to the Americas, settling into semi-anonymity after the war to escape the disgrace of his Nazi past. But unlike Barbie, he was blacklisted after the war for his associations, not his actions; he was never brought to justice, because he was not a war criminal. As his surviving daughter recently insisted, he had been conscripted; in his defense, he did what he had to do to survive but never actually joined the Nazi party. Because the central drama of his greatest work of Nazi cinematography—Riefenstahl’s Olympiad—is really Jessie Owens’ triumph, not Hitler’s, you could even plead his case by saying that if Riefenstahl scripted the pageantry, he filmed the athletes.

  In other words, he’s the sort of person for whom the phrase “Good German” was coined to gloss over the sins of willed ignorance and comfortable complicity and to exonerate the individual on the strength of their passivity. This is Ertl’s position, as we meet him in the early pages of the novel, railing against his disgrace, against the stories which have been told about him. His narcissism is such that he believes that he can be remembered as the first cameraman who filmed underwater, that his personal achievements in the cinema can and should be disentangled from his associations with Nazi Germany. The stories that are told about him are the wrong stories, he declares, and so he sets out to correct the record, to live a life in the new world that will leave his life in the old behind.

  Since the novel begins with Ertl and his family embarking on a journey to find a lost Incan city—the lost and legendary Paititi, which Ertl believes to be the Bolivian Machu Pichu, and for which he plans to play the role of pioneering explorer—the reader can be forgiven for expecting that the novel will tell the story of the expedition, that we will read the drama of an old world exile struggling to transplant his family and his legacy in the new. But it doesn’t become this novel either; in fact, as it turns out, the novel will barely be about Ertl at all. The journey has hardly gotten underway when the narration leaps ahead, to the daughter and mother that were left behind—to the story, essentially, of a single cigarette they shared and what it means and will mean—and then it leaps again, and repeatedly, across the years that span the lives that each daughter will live afterwards. Affections will not, it turns out, be about Nazis in the Americas; it will be about what it feels like to feel affectionate to those who are, what it means to be the daughter of someone you might tendentiously argue to be a “Good German.”

  It’s worth observing, at this point, just how many different novels this novel head-fakes then refuses to be, how many classics of Latin American literature one feels it to be associated with. I found the opening page reminiscent of the famous opening sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude—with Ertl, as grandiose and narcissistic patriarch, a Quixote akin to José Arcadio Buendía himself—but since it concerns Nazis in the Americas, comparisons with Bolaño are unavoidable, and warranted. Moreover, Hasbún was the late Ricardo Piglia’s student at Princeton, where he wrote a dissertation about personal diaries, and it’s hard not to read this novel in the shadow of Piglio’s own literary diary, the first volume of which will be released in October; Affections is written in an intimate and personal voice, diaristic in feel, if not in fact. Moreover, since the Ertl family was real—and you can read their Wikipedia pages, if you want—the novel’s blurring of fact and fiction makes resemble any number of works that re-write the historical archive, especially in its desire to take stories framed by patriarchs and find the voices lost within them, of women. But the book never becomes Rodolpho Walsh or Diamala Eltit, either, or anyone else.

  Any attempt to say what this novel is—the family saga as allegory for the nation, e.g., or an exploration of mid-century revolutionary violence in Latin America—swiftly becomes a statement of what the novel feels itself becoming and declines to be. And this, it seems to me, is what this novel is, this gesture of uneasy refusal and slippery deferral, the experience of a story being told just long enough for it to outgrow itself. But starting from the original flight from the family’s Nazi past—in which they are very literally displaced, and in the process of becoming something else—displacement comes to be more than just a theme. It is the novel’s mode of perception. Each of the twelve brief chapters has the narrative texture of a person looking at a photograph, and remembering or dreaming: As Hans Ertl and his family struggle to distance themselves from the images that he produced—and to make new ones for themselves—photography serves as a metaphor for the alienation of change. To take a photo of a thing is to make a record of the thing that it will never again be, the still point receding into the horizon behind you; to take a selfie, even, is to memorialize the person you’ll never again be.

  I could describe what happens in the novel, I suppose, the dramas and lives its characters play out. But most of what “happens” in it happens off-screen, and most of the novel is scenes of anticipation, or memory, or even reveries about what could be, or could have been. Love affairs, killings, deaths and life… all the big events in the novel are experienced in memory or in anticipation. The result is that Affections is always one thing in the process of becoming another, but it never quite arrives; the future keeps receding and the past keeps piling up, ever present. Because we are always reading about just after or just before, life, in this novel, is what happens in-between, in the stories that are made to contain an uncontainable life and in the work of making new stories to contain what has not yet come. The reader is left suspended, shuttling back and forth along the timeline, looking forward and back for answers that never quite come. References to things that have already happened are rarely explained, or filled out; every time the novel seems to move in one direction, it shifts and sets off in another. As a result, every chapter feels like an excerpt from a much longer novel that we won’t get to read; every shot a reminder of all the angles and perspectives and footage left on the cutting room floor.

  Scott Esposito called Affections “one of those brief novels that Latin America specializes in,” and these comparisons with “Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Alejandro Zambra, and Samanta Schweblin” are certainly a good place to start. But Affections’ brevity—or, rather, its radical incompletion—is also very particularly its own: to remind you that while stories and photographs struggle to freeze time into manageable units, into usable pasts, time marches on. Because it’s incredibly important that we never even get an ending to the story; this is a novel that ends with the digging of a grave, but who will occupy that grave? The novel ends, but the grave still waits. Resting places are not this novel’s specialty, it turns out; time marches on and the camera keeps running.

• The Book Bag
  http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/reviews/index.php?title=Affections_by_Rodrigo_Hasbun_and_Sophie_Hughes_(translator)
  Word count: 738

  Affections by Rodrigo Hasbun and Sophie Hughes (translator)

  Affections by Rodrigo Hasbun and Sophie Hughes (translator)

  1782272135.jpg
  Buy Affections by Rodrigo Hasbun and Sophie Hughes (translator) at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
  Category: General Fiction
  Rating: 4.5/5
  Reviewer: John Lloyd
  Reviewed by John Lloyd
  Summary: A quietly affecting novella, bringing the strangest of lives and their connections with each other from real life to the page with no little power.
  Buy? Yes Borrow? Yes
  Pages: 160 Date: June 2016
  Publisher: Pushkin Press
  ISBN: 9781782272137

  Share on:

  If you thought your teenaged years were a struggle to work out the world, and yourself, consider that of Heidi Ertl. Or either of her sisters – this book serves as a sort of tribute to these three real-life women, and the lives that came out of their very disjointed youth, forced to be rarefied from the norm by their family uprooting. Father Hans was one of Leni Riefenstahl's key cameramen, and a Nazi military photographer, before taking the whole family into post-war exile in Bolivia. Their mother would have followed him to the ends of the earth – as in part would their daughters, the older two of which start the book by joining him on an expedition to discover a lost Incan city. Heidi finds young, instant love on the trek – but sees the dark side of such emotions, too. Older sister Monika, who might well be manic depressive, finds something else, while the baby of the family stays at home with a maudlin mother. So much here could be the hook on which to hang a full novel, but if anything it's the reaction of them all to this unusual formative journey that inspires this book.

  And it has to be said that while it's not a full novel – nobody would struggle to read this in two hours – it's just as rich as you'd want. Part of that must come down to the different narrative voices used. We just get used to seeing Heidi's point of view of the expedition, when we jump to her kid sister and her Christmas back at home. The oldest girl joins in too, in an unusual second person voice. A man crops up, with a weird paragraph formatting and with everything starting with a Yes,… as if he's responding to a questioner or rehearsing to himself the giving of a statement. Plain narration from outside the sisterhood and their larger family is thin on the ground.

  But nothing reads thinly about this book. Rodrigo Hasbun has been receiving accolades at home in Bolivia and elsewhere, and this proves why. It's taut, it's a little strange – certainly it took me to a much different place than to where I was expecting from the opening chapters – but it says a lot. There's a richness here you would appreciate and, to repeat, expect much more readily from a larger, denser read. If you have an understanding of Latin American politics and history, well – you've got the icing on the cake. I got an eye-opener to a family I'd never heard about, and one which certainly held my interest despite the lack of relevance the Bolivian audience would definitely find. But that's not to say this reads as a faction about these women's lives, however remarkable – the author's note points out this does not intend to be a faithful portrait, rather a novelisation of the events and characters. Those events and characters, and the way the book addresses the theme of the after-effects of displacement, are certainly worth sharing a little time with.

  I must thank the publishers for my review copy.

  There's fallout of a different kind, but one that's equally unusual, in The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel.

  Buy Affections by Rodrigo Hasbun and Sophie Hughes (translator) at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy Affections by Rodrigo Hasbun and Sophie Hughes (translator) at Amazon.co.uk

  Buy Affections by Rodrigo Hasbun and Sophie Hughes (translator) at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy Affections by Rodrigo Hasbun and Sophie Hughes (translator) at Amazon.com.

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• Complete Review
  http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/bolivia/hasbunr.htm
  Word count: 1718

  Affections

  by
  Rodrigo Hasbún

  general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

  To purchase Affections

  Title: Affections
  Author: Rodrigo Hasbún
  Genre: Novel
  Written: 2015 (Eng. 2016)
  Length: 132 pages
  Original in: Spanish
  Availability: Affections - US
  Los afectos - US
  Affections - UK
  Affections - Canada
  Les tourments - France
  Die Affekte - Deutschland
  Andarsene - Italia
  Los afectos - España

  Spanish title: Los afectos
  Translated by Sophie Hughes

  - Return to top of the page -

  Our Assessment:

  B : fine family-tale; interesting presentation

  See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Summaries Source Rating Date Reviewer
  Financial Times . 2/9/2016 Julius Purcell
  The NY Times Book Rev. . 17/12/2017 Mara Faye Lethem
  El País . 29/7/2015 Francisco Solano
  The Scotsman . 27/7/2016 Allan Massie
  World Lit. Today . 1-2/2018 Kevin Canfield

  From the Reviews:

  "Much like the story itself, the novel’s laconic title is both suggestive and cryptic. Genetics, nationality and politics form, break and re-form the bonds between its characters, even if affection itself often seems thin on the ground. Sophie Hughes’s translation reflects the affectless prose style that often marks the work of young Spanish-language writers post García Márquez, an underlying hint of turmoil rescuing it from flatness." - Julius Purcell, Financial Times

  "This slim, striking novel recounts the bizarre story, in poignant shimmering flashes and the subtle interstices separating those flashes, of the Ertl family as imagined by Hasbún. (...) Hasbún’s anti-expository prose is very effective" - Mara Faye Lethem, The New York Times Book Review

  "La novela no responde a todos los interrogantes que plantea; más bien se decanta por informar del proceso de disolución, donde los vínculos afectivos persisten en la memoria irremediablemente vivos, pero también inútiles, pues la memoria, como se dice en el epílogo, no es un lugar seguro" - Francisco Solano, El País

  "This is a finely atmospheric book, admirably translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes. It’s a work of sympathetic imagination, written with cool economy, elegance and understanding. It’s a reconstruction of real lives, real historical events, but Hasbún’s achievement is to make it perfectly fictional, which is to say truer than fact." - Allan Massie, The Scotsman

  "Though the book’s medley of voices begets a couple of jarring transitions, it provides Hasbún with a host of angles from which to examine broad societal shifts and brief, intimate moments in the lives of his ensemble cast. (...) Lots of novels plumb the intersection of the personal and the political, but few have this kind of intellectual heft and emotional subtlety." - Kevin Canfield, World Literature Today

  Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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  The complete review's Review:

  In just over a hundred and thirty generously-spaced pages, Affections chronicles some two decades of the lives of a family, the two parts of the novel each consisting of six chapters (in the first-person, presenting multiple perspectives -- family-members and a few others), along with a final short view 'From a Distance'.
  The family is the Ertl-family -- father Hans and: "his clan, the women who waited for him", his wife, and three daughters -- and closely follows the main biographical outlines of the actual Ertl family. Hans was a famous cameraman in Nazi Germany -- Leni Riefenstahl's "star cameraman" -- who emigrated with his family to Bolivia after the war, while eldest daughter Monika would become notorious for her part in a guerilla movement, specifically as the assassin of the man who ordered the dead Che Guevara's hands to be chopped off (as they had been, for identification purposes).
  Hans was an adventurer, too: the book opens when he has just returned from Nanga Parbat [see his famous film], and his next grand ambition is to find the lost Inca city of Paitití. Monika joins her father on his futile quest, as does still school-age middle girl Heidi, at least for the first expedition; the youngest, Trixi, remains removed from these adventures.
  The presentation of the novel is not so much fragmentary but splintered, reflecting the family and how its members drift apart: a sense of distance and separation is pervasive, whether the characters are in close proximity to one another or, as eventually, far-flung apart. Even as many of the chapters involve characters briefly or ostensibly coming together -- visiting, for example -- the distance between them ultimately just increases; among the few examples of any connection and bonding is when abandoned mother and youngest daughter -- the others are off on their fools' quest, looking for Paitití -- share a smoke at Christmas -- which also includes one of the novel's bleakest exchanges:

  "I want you to remember me like this," she said.
  "How ?"
  "Like this, Trixi. In the kitchen, smoking with you on the Christmas of 'fifty-five."

  Hans has an affair, beginning a long-term relationship with an assistant; Heidi and her husband becomes successful store-owners in Germany (though the relationship doesn't last: four kids and ten years is the extent of it); Monika goes off with the guerillas; Trixi drifts (and the girls' mother simply dies along the way): there isn't even anything close to a center that can hold here. Dissatisfaction, especially in personal relationships, is a unifying thread; none seem to be able to find an other that they can actually hold onto. All the marriages fail -- Monika tried the traditional, conventional role, too, before heading down the guerilla path -- and even Hans' relationship inevitably collapses -- though, typically too, in such a way that he barely realizes (or is willing to admit to):

  "Are you still together ?"
  It took a few minutes for her father to reply that he didn't know and that Burgl had been away for almost three years. They wrote to one another every fortnight and spoke from time to time. For now, they didn't have any plans to start things up again.

  If not always enduring pariah-status, the Ertls remain outsiders: early on Heidi notes that even as they begin to adapt to life in Bolivia: "we would never stop being outsiders", while decades later Trixi finds that Monika's reputation tars her and the rest of the family too; any gains they had made in settling in were lost as, inevitably, everywhere: "They shut us out".
  Affections is an interesting study of displacement and (family-)reputation, the choices -- specifically Hans and Monika's -- having repercussions that extend to the entire family, even as there is less and less unity to the family-whole. Yet it's not just the short chapters, scenes from across several decades, that give the novel the feeling of a writing-exercise, a novel in sketches: Affections is a sort of life-sampler, zeroing in on a few scenes from over this extended period of time, but essentially avoiding any full picture(s). Hasbún's work is both helped and undermined by his reliance on real-life models: the Ertl-story comes so heavily baggaged that readers can easily fill in much that he leaves unmentioned or only alludes to -- but it also limits where his fiction can go, tying it to the real-life facts.
  The scenes in Affections are well and effectively presented -- consistently engaging -- yet the novel as a whole retains an almost skeletal feel, overshadowed too by the real-life Ertls, making for a fine but somewhat odd and ultimately frustrating read.

  - M.A.Orthofer, 18 November 2017

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  Links:
  Affections:

  Pushkin Press publicity page
  Simon & Schuster publicity page
  Literatura Random House publicity page
  Buchet Chastel publicity page
  Suhrkamp publicity page
  Sur publicity page
  Q & A at The White Review
  Q & A at The Quarterly Conversation

  Reviews:

  Aspettando il caffè (Italian)
  Badische Zeitung (German)
  The Bookbag
  Brief Book Reviews
  El Cultural (Spanish)
  culturamas (Spanish)
  Deutschlandfunk Kultur (German)
  doe-eyed critic
  Estado Crítico (Spanish)
  Fixpoetry (German)
  Flanerí (Italian)
  der Freitag (German)
  Il giro del mondo attraverso i libri (Italian)
  Sven Hensel (German)
  His Futile Preoccupations .....
  Historical Novel Society
  Internazionale (Italian)
  JacquiWine's Journal
  Kirkus Reviews
  literaturkritik.de (German)
  il manifesto (Italian)
  Manila Book Review
  The Modern Novel
  Il mondo di Athena (Italian)
  El Mundo (Spanish)
  The National
  The New Inquiry
  new york journal of books
  Niemandsland (German)
  novellieren (German)
  El País (Spanish)
  Ploughshares
  Die Presse (German)
  Pterodáctilo (Spanish)
  Publishers Weekly
  Renie's Lesetagebuch (German)
  Sandammeer (German)
  The Scotsman
  Der Spiegel (German)
  Steffiliest (German)
  Tony's Reading List
  Tu vas t'abîmer les yeux (French)
  Tzer Island
  Underrated Reads
  Vísperas (Spanish)
  Wilde Seiten (German)
  Wordds without Borders
  World Literature Today

  Other books of interest under review:

  See Index of Latin and South American literature
  See Index of Real People in Works of Fiction
  Other books from Pushkin Press under review

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  About the Author:

  Bolivian author Rodrigo Hasbún was born in 1981.

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• Washington Independent Review of Books
  http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/bookreview/affections-los-afectos
  Word count: 920

  Book Review in Fiction
  Affections: A Novel

  By Rodrigo Hasbún; translated by Sophie Hughes Simon & Schuster 144 pp.

  Reviewed by Jennifer Showell-Hartogs
  January 17, 2018

  A German family’s life unravels following a post-WWII move to Bolivia

  Following the end of World War II, a number of families left Europe and relocated to the Americas. Some were searching for new beginnings; others were fleeing the past. In Affections (Los Afectos), Rodrigo Hasbún provides a fictionalized account of the real-life Ertl family, who survived the war unscathed but ultimately found despair in their new lives in Bolivia.

  The book initially revolves around family patriarch Hans. Once a cinematographer for the Nazi party, Hans, in his self-imposed exile, has refashioned himself as an explorer. He is the type of man who is larger than life, who takes up all the space in the room. He is the type of man who films a wildfire rather than running from it, who believes that the legendary Incan city of Paititi has been waiting for him to discover it.

  But rather than finding one of Bolivia’s lost cities, he loses something important: his own family. The expedition to Paititi is where the Ertls begin to unravel, leading each of them down their own sad path.

  As the story progresses, it becomes clear that it is not Hans, but the eldest of the three Ertl daughters, Monika, who is the tie that binds and then breaks the family. While each family member has their own small tragedy, Monika is the doomed heroine.

  One of Monika’s lovers — her brother-in-law — describes her as “the misunderstood child, the chaotic, rebellious teenager, the woman who went on to lose all perspective and no longer knew when to stop and ended up hurting herself and others…the woman who went on to cause so much hurt.” Her younger sister Heidi describes “shrinking even smaller in her shadow, feeling uglier and stupider and less funny and less interesting.”

  But Monika is not entirely unsympathetic. She grows from a bored socialite in a loveless marriage, to philanthropist, and eventually goes on to become a member of the Bolivian ELN (the guerilla movement led by Che Guevara). It becomes clear that she believes in the revolution and has an earnest desire to change Bolivia.

  Still, there is a bleakness to Monika’s life as a revolutionary. Hasbún emphasizes how she forces herself to become “the body they used,” and struggles against the idea that “you could abandon the fight, ignore what matters most, go back to your life from before.” Hasbún also details the horrors of the revolution, the torture and deaths and ultimate failure of those who believed in the resistance.

  Monika’s story is told through the memories of her sisters and lovers. At one point, she is described as “the woman whose memory had tormented me for years, the woman who had left a permanent stain inside me.” Those close to Monika face their own battles — illness, infidelity, loneliness, loss — but it is Monika’s life and actions that keep haunting them. In Affections, there are no happy endings.

  Though Affections is beautifully written and eloquently translated, it ends abruptly. And while the historical figure of Monika Ertl might be well known in Hasbún’s native Bolivia, my guess is many American readers have never heard of her. After all, most know little more about Che Guevara than what his image looks like embossed upon a novelty T-shirt; the vast majority are probably unfamiliar with the German-born woman who was said to have avenged his death.

  As someone who has worked on issues related to Latin America and the Caribbean for the last 15 years, I suspect I know more about the region’s history than the average American, but I was also unfamiliar with Monika and had trouble following some of the book’s developments without further research. Therefore, the English edition of the book could have benefited from a brief foreword (or afterword) on the Ertls.

  Historical fiction is one of my favorite genres, and I enjoy delving into the “true” story after reading the fictional account. I read Affections twice: once, without any background on the Ertl family, and once after perusing several articles in Spanish and German (little information on Monika is readily available in English), and still had a number of unanswered questions.

  What happened to Monika? What happened to the sisters who lived in her shadow? What caused Monika to change from a bored housewife into a guerilla and assassin? Perhaps little is known about this part of her life or the lives of her sisters, but I would have liked to have seen Hasbún take the liberty of fleshing out their stories.

  The sign of a great book is the sadness you feel when it comes to an end. While I was left wanting to know more about the fate of the Ertl family, my own sadness came from having read so few pages of Hasbún’s prose. I look forward to reading his other works.

  Jennifer Showell-Hartogs is an avid reader, world traveler, and a federal employee. She resides in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband, daughters, and dog.
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• Brazos Bookstore
  www.brazosbookstore.com/articles/reviews/review-affections-rodrigo-hasbún
  Word count: 326

  Review: AFFECTIONS, by Rodrigo Hasbún

  Bolivian writer (and Houston resident) Rodrigo Hasbún is a writer with startling skills. In 2010 he was listed by Granta as one of the twenty best writers in Spanish under the age of 35. His English-language debut, AFFECTIONS, is coming out this month and we’re all excited to see Rodrigo read and discuss this remarkable novel on Tuesday September 12th at 7 PM.

  AFFECTIONS is a fictional account of real-life German cameraman Hans Ertl and his family. A well-known cinematographer for the Nazis, Hans moved his family to La Paz in the 1950’s. What follows is a subtle and melancholic story, narrated by different members of the Ertl family, mainly Hans’ three daughters, Heidi, Monika and Trixie. The novel moves swiftly, the reader seeing what true displacement - from a culture, a language - feels like. Divided roughly in half, the first half focuses on Hans’ desire to find and film the ruins of Incan city Paitit. The second half takes place ten years later amidst the backdrop of revolution. Told in short, sparse chapters, AFFECTIONS is one of the best novels I have read this year, replete with guerilla fighters, revolutionaries and quixotic filmmakers. It is also filled with subtle surprises, especially what Hasbún chooses to focus on and what he chooses to ignore.

  A moving and meditative book on a family torn apart by the winds of revolution and history, AFFECTIONS will hopefully prompt Hasbún’s other books to be translated into English.

  AFFECTIONS comes out September 12 from Simon & Schuster. Join us that day for the release of his book at Brazos Bookstore! The event will begin at 7pm. Hasbún will be joined by translator Sophie Hughes.
  Affections Cover Image
  Affections (Hardcover)
  By Rodrigo Hasbun, Sophie Hughes (Translator)
  ISBN: 9781501154799
  Availability: On Our Shelves Now
  Published: Simon & Schuster - September 12th, 2017

• Financial Times
  https://www.ft.com/content/a1723778-6f6c-11e6-a0c9-1365ce54b926
  Word count: 809

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  https://www.ft.com/content/a1723778-6f6c-11e6-a0c9-1365ce54b926

  Affections by Rodrigo Hasbún review — a singular family
  A Bolivian novelist explores the inner lives of a real exiled Nazi and his Marxist assassin daughter

  Save to myFT

  Julius Purcell September 2, 2016
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  Hans Ertl was Leni Riefenstahl’s star cameraman, who used his art to glorify the Third Reich in films such as Olympia. After the war, Ertl stole away to South America, but his hopes of a clean break were dashed spectacularly when his eldest daughter, Monika, became one of Bolivia’s best-known Marxist guerrillas. In 1971, aged 33, Monika assassinated a Bolivian minister to avenge the death of Che Guevara, and was herself killed two years later by Bolivian agents.

  Affections, Bolivian novelist Rodrigo Hasbún’s brief, baffling but intriguing novel about the Ertls, centres on a family unable to make sense of the violence that entwined itself around them like poison ivy. In an author’s note, Hasbún carefully asserts his novelist’s right to portray his subjects’ inner lives freely, even if his plot respects the key facts and chronology of this singular family. Known for his short, internalised tales narrated by women, Hasbún tells the Ertls’ story as a series of vignettes, each from the perspective of a different member of the family circle. At times, these seem like stanzas of a long poem, one whose overall interrelatedness is, teasingly, never quite resolved. For those unfamiliar with the Bolivian political context, the lack of background explanation may make it a frustrating read.

  The novel opens in the 1950s with Hans’s two eldest daughters, Monika and Heidi, accompanying him on an expedition to attempt to discover Bolivia’s legendary lost city of Paitití. Hans Ertl’s Nazi career seems to have been more opportunistic than ideological, and he emerges from Hasbún’s account as a kind of neurotic star around which his devoted female dependants orbit.

  Hans’s failure to find Paitití triggers a sense of drift in his family. His marriage sours. Trixie, his youngest daughter, becomes a chain-smoking homebody. Monika, Hans’s favourite, marries a rich boy from a mine-owning family before embarking on her journey towards radicalism and a violent death.

  Much like the story itself, the novel’s laconic title is both suggestive and cryptic. Genetics, nationality and politics form, break and re-form the bonds between its characters, even if affection itself often seems thin on the ground. Sophie Hughes’s translation reflects the affectless prose style that often marks the work of young Spanish-language writers post García Márquez, an underlying hint of turmoil rescuing it from flatness. “To feel nothing is to feel something?” Monika asks herself as she embarks on her tense mission.

  Hasbún’s 2007 novel El Lugar del Cuerpo opens with a brother raping his little sister. In the account of their otherwise unremarkable family life, this nightly event is never mentioned, as if the vocabulary of the family is too limited for such deeds. Much the same occurs in Affections, with regards to the past: “He was no longer welcome in [Germany], regardless of the debt German cinema owed to him,” laments Hans’s middle daughter, as if Hitler’s Germany — whose image Hans had done so much to exalt — had never happened.

  The Marxist daughter of a Nazi father presents an intriguing dialectic, which another writer might have exploited more wordily. Hasbún leaves much of the process of Monika’s radicalisation offstage, showing glimpses of a woman both enraged by, and in thrall to, her overbearing father.

  At the novel’s close, Hans summons two labourers to dig a pit. What’s it for? A grave for him, or his daughter? As they dig, the villagers reflect on how this is “what men like him bring on themselves” — just one of many moments in the novel that recall Sylvia Plath’s famous poem, “Daddy”, with its last verse:

  There’s a stake in your fat black heart
  And the villagers never liked you
  . . . Daddy, daddy, you bastard,
  I’m through.

  Affections, by Rodrigo Hasbún, translated by Sophie Hughes, Pushkin, RRP£9.99, 160 pages
  Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2018. All rights reserved.

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