Daniela Catrileo’s Chilco, translated from Spanish by Jacob Edelstein, is an extremely good book.
set in a speculative alternate Chile (though the country is unnamed and its capital is referred to as “Capital City”), the novel follows a young Quechua woman, Mari, and her Mapuche partner, Pascale, as they navigate the both figurative and literal collapse of life in the capital, where Mari has lived her entire life, and the pull of Pascale’s home, the fictional island of Chilco. it is a novel in fragments, each chapter a short vignette (all narrated by Mari), a moment from her life, or an account of something in Pascale’s, or a picture of their life together. through these vignettes, the novel traces Mari’s life from her childhood under the watchful eye of her grandmother, who immigrated from Peru as a young woman, and her mother and aunt — all of whom have been disappointed in love — through the first time she kissed another girl to her job as a secretary and later archivist at a museum, her relationship with Leila, her Haitian coworker, and finally meeting and falling in love with Pascale.
the big surprise here was how unapologetically and also kind of matter-of-factly queer this novel is, something the blurb does not indicate at all and something that Catrileo (as well as Edelstein in this translation) has clearly given careful thought to: Pascale is transfeminine and is referred to with they/them, but only in one chapter — throughout the rest of the novel the text scrupulously avoids referring to them with gendered pronouns or, as I realized flipping back, with adjectives that would be marked for gender in Spanish. having just commented (negatively) on this in Siân Llywelyn’s Darogan, I’ll note here that I feel way better about this in Catrileo, because Pascale’s gender does matter: the text does not treat it like an afterthought but rather foregrounds it both as a significant element of Pascale’s past and as one of the wedges that occasionally comes between Mari and Pascale, a weapon Mari can use and then regret using.
I marked this on Storygraph as having lovable protagonists, but it would be more accurate, I think, to say that it has memorable, vital protagonists. much of the book is concerned with Mari’s flaws, real and imagined, her anxieties and uncertainties, her manipulative streak, an inflexibility that she struggles against as she tries to figure out where she belongs — quite literally, as a diasporic, urban Indigenous person with limited connection to her grandmother’s language and culture (as her grandmother vehemently denies being Quechua) and no connection to her family’s traditional homeland, a stark contrast with Pascale, who grew up speaking both Mapudungun and Chilqueño, the island’s creole language. but Pascale, too, has a complicated relationship with “home” as a result of their gender and the violence they have experienced for it: if they are drawn home, back to the sea and the island, it is not entirely without trepidation.
the structure of the novel — as well as its general vibe — reminded me strongly of Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall’s Tauhou, although with a more straightforward throughline. there is a similar negotiation between island and mainland, but also the vignettes jumping around time and space but grouped thematically into four sections/sub-stories: “A Preliminary Inventory of Events”, which introduces Mari’s life and also her ambiguous relationship with Chilco; “The Devastation of the Devastation”, about the pillaging of Capital City by the forces of capital, culminating in the literal collapse of much of the city into sinkholes and land speculators’ relocation to a new, “sustainable” development to the east; “You Are Wild Fuchsia, Like the Flowers of Chilco”, about the development of Mari and Pascale}s relationship; and “Notes on an Island Life”, about Mari and Pascale’s life on the island, the violence that shatters it, and the sudden possibility of hope on the other side of violence. (I am thinking of the end of Somhairle MacGill-Eain’s An Cuilithionn — “gu treunmhor chithear an Cuilithionn / ’s e ’g èirigh air taobh eile duilghe.”).
interspersed through these are excerpts from a collection Mari and Leila assembled for Pascale, the “Chilco Archive”, a collection of colonial and anticolonial glimpses, fragments of the island’s history: an onomastic note, archival drawings, an encyclopedia article on a flower, a 19th-century English travelogue, a transcribed Mapudungun song. as the novel’s title suggests, while it tells a story about Mari and Pascale it is also a story about Chilco, about home and the possibility of homecoming, about what it means to imagine a home that you have never known and perhaps can never know, and about the ways settler colonialism and imperialism continue to constrain these imaginings. and it’s a story about new kinds of belonging, about diasporic encounters and solidarities — the ways of living that become possible when Mari (Quechua), Pascale (Mapuche), and Leila (Haitian) meet in a place that regards all of them as, at best, visitors to be tolerated and, at worst, problems to be eradicated.
I would pair this with Tauhou, of course, but it also has me thinking I should read Yuri Rytkheu’s When the Whales Leave. much to consider here!
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