Las moradas

(The Dwellings) Nicolás Cabral’s voice is one of New Latin American Narrative’s  most peculiar voices. As in his Catálogo de formas, his first novel, The Dwelling’s prose is one built through ruthless depuration whilst at the same time, plural.
Two quotes open up this demanding book of tales: one by Saint Teresa of Jesus (“Truth is that not in all dwellings you can break into by your own force...”)  and another one by Lacan (“all entrance of the being into its own dwelling poses a degree of neglect...”). In them we are foretold in the best way about a mesmerising text, out of the ordinary, full of voices and situations. There are tales in these pages that go from the real to the unreal, from the seemingly mundane to the fantastic. But above the themes –And the mastery to approach the different ways to write a story– there’s something we hardly ever find in most writers: the scape the ordinary, the disdain for commonplaces.