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    Adrift on a Sleepless Sea
    Adrift on a Sleepless Sea
    Adrift on a Sleepless Sea
    Ebook104 pages1 hour

    Adrift on a Sleepless Sea

    By Carmen Avila

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    About this ebook

    A group of students searching for the author of the shortest story in German literature happen upon a Nazi hidden in the Amazon. They, along with some singular voyagers on a boat where no one can sleep, inhabit this collection of stories, winner of Mexico’s 2013 Rafael Ramírez Heredia National Story Award.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBadPress
    Release dateJan 9, 2021
    ISBN9781071583401
    Adrift on a Sleepless Sea

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      Book preview

      Adrift on a Sleepless Sea - Carmen Avila

      Adrift on a Sleepless Sea

      Carmen Ávila

      Translated from Spanish into English by Olivia Caputo

      Awarded the 2013 Rafael Ramírez Heredia National Story Prize by the Tampico Tamaulipas Council in Mexico.

      Prologue

      As a reader, I sometimes prefer to wait until the end of a book to read the prologue. I’m always worried it will spoil something important in the story. But now that I’m the one writing the prologue, I’m not remotely tempted to quote paragraphs from the book, or even to give you a general synopsis, merely an appetizer.

      Adrift on a Sleepless Sea is divided, or united, as you’ll see, into three parts. In each of these parts, Carmen proves her narrative chops with her irreverent style. She’s a writer who takes risks with her different approaches, and the results are well worth it. She constructs for us a cathedral of absurdism, surrealism, and magical realism. She interweaves the detective novel with the anecdote and the fable into the shape of a lively narrative, unburdened by excesses, and infused with the sense of humor and naturalness that are her greatest weapons.

      Carmen has created an atemporal dreamland that bends the laws of physics, where characters come and go, drifting through her stories. Adrift on a Sleepless Sea contains the reincarnated spirit of a twisted Scheherazade who climbed into bed with the Brothers Grimm as well as something of an exotic Robert Louis Stevenson that dreamed he was a butterfly that dreamed he was an exotic Robert Louis Stevenson.

      Carmen Ávila’s narrative has one other specific advantage, which is discernible from the very first page: she is an excellent poet. It would suffice just to say she’s a poet, but to my mind she’s an excellent one. As a writer who is also able to navigate the waters of poetry, she can draw from wider range of resources to conjure the images she floats our way, rendering them very real in our minds, for all their unreality. 

      The stories in this book are built upon the author’s influences, obsessions, and memories. She’ll explain them in her own time within these pages, so I see no reason to repeat them here. I will mention, however, that if Carmen were to spin a globe and stop it by pointing at random, it would not come as a shock if her finger landed on a place that she has been before. This is due to her insatiable curiosity to know other cultures, places, and people. When she sent me the manuscript for Adrift on a Sleepless Sea with an invitation to write this prologue, she gave as a reason (in addition to our shared affinity for literature and the friendship that unites us), our love of traveling the world. To be fair, there are some glaring differences between us; Carmen is less selfish when she travels (though all travelers are inherently somewhat selfish, which is not necessarily a bad thing). Carmen manages to get involved in humanitarian causes, undertake academic studies, participate in conferences, get under people’s skin, live simply when necessary, learn languages. All of this has made her more sensitive and empathetic, which leads to a more comprehensive understanding of those faraway places, an understanding for which she is repaid when the time comes to create her literary postcards.

      To travel is to leave one’s comfort zone, to revert to being a child; a being that lacks the words to express oneself, for whom new foods are unfamiliar. To travel is to once again experience that forgotten fear and uncertainty. Carmen is an example of that perpetual return to childhood and its stories: in this case they are the myths and legends of the other adventurers we meet along the way.

      Incidentally, her book reminds me of a phrase I once heard, by the songwriter (and avid traveler) Facundo Cabral, which goes something like this: If the world is round, then I don’t know what it means to go forward. Likewise, Carmen’s ship roams without a compass, guided by the swells and storms that bring in its stories. But I’ll stop myself here, so as not to give away any of those details that will ruin the surprise. 

      Finally, I want to thank my dear, admired Carmen Ávila for allowing me to be a part of this book; I know how important it is to her. So without further delay, I invite you to board this rudderless ship of stories and undertake, as I have had the privilege to do, a marvelous journey through the author’s sleepless sea. 

      ––––––––

      Miguel Barquiarena

      The Shortest Story in All German Literature (1945)

      The Shortest Story in All German Literature

      ––––––––

      Ja!

      (Siegfried Wolf, 1945)

      Mariscal Sucre International Airport, Quito, Ecuador

      Monday, May 23, 10:45am

      Our airplane finally lands in Ecuador. No one is there to greet us as we navigate the international airport in Quito, the capital city of the world’s belly button. Andrés, Jade, and I barely manage to haul our heavy suitcases through the long corridor to go hail a taxi that will drop us off at the cheapest hotel we can find, since we’re low on cash. My prosthetic leg slows us down as I drag myself along. Once we’ve made it  through customs, Jade and I with freshly stamped passports, Andrés pulls out a bottle of tequila and takes a swig as we walk. What an asshole; doesn’t even offer us a sip.

      On the Danube

      A slightly insane, foreign collector placed an internet ad selling, for 20 euros, the historical remnants of the "Oberdonau Zeitung," the premiere newspaper from the province in which Hitler was born. It primarily served to inform workers at the factory and nearby concentration camp of bad tidings from the war.

      The newspaper had dwindled to only two sheets as the war dragged on. The second to last edition, from the 26th of April, 1945, declares that American tanks are entering the town and Russian soldiers (the Soviet army) have reached the forests on the outskirts of Vienna. Classified ads inquire about missing persons, in hopes of finding them alive, and about private property that was destroyed by the bombings.

      Roberto Bolaño claimed that the final issue of "Oberdonau Zeitung" was printed on the 27th of April, 1945. It consisted of a single page, on which was published a famous story by German author Siegfried Wolf: the shortest story in all German literature.

      C:\Users\Pedro Ávila Jaquis\Downloads\ODZ1.jpg

      The Hand of God and the Foot of D10S

      Diego "El Pelusa" Maradona was always telling me about that blessed day, the

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