Transentients, The
Translated by Jessica Powell
Tomás Ugarte, an advertising executive in Santiago, Chile, is grappling with a midlife crisis—turning forty, quitting his job and in the midst of a divorce—when he begins to experience inexplicable episodes of amnesia. Hoping to outrace this dilemma, he plans to travel abroad for a year and chart the second half of his life. Instead, he will journey into an unexpected, and very foreign territory, one where the boundary between the self and the other becomes dangerously interchangeable. Much like the works of Auster and Murakami, The Transentients defies easy categorization: it is a genuinely disturbing psychological novel that borders on the uncanny. A bewitching puzzle-box with a propulsive plot, as well as a high-wire act of prose, a metaphysical mystery lies at its core that ensnares both the protagonist and the reader. Stretching from the streets of Santiago onto a treacherous escarpment in the Chilean Andes and to the hills of Valparaiso, and then careening out into the vast beckoning of the Atacama desert, The Transentients traverses the porousness of reality . . . and the malleability of consciousness.
Carlos Fuentes called this novel one of the essential Latin American works of the new century: “Missana’s riveting novel throws open a doorway onto the fragility of the self in our time.” Now at last The Transentients is available to an English-speaking audience, thanks in no small part to Jessica Powell’s especially fine translation.
| Weight | 0.350000 |
|---|---|
| ISBN13/Barcode | 9781620540435 |
| ISBN10 | 1620540436 |
| Author | Sergio Missana [translated by Jessica Powell] |
| Binding | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Date Published | 1st June 2024 |
| Pages | 256 |
| Publisher | McPherson & Company,Publishers |
Translated by Jessica Powell
Tomás Ugarte, an advertising executive in Santiago, Chile, is grappling with a midlife crisis—turning forty, quitting his job and in the midst of a divorce—when he begins to experience inexplicable episodes of amnesia. Hoping to outrace this dilemma, he plans to travel abroad for a year and chart the second half of his life. Instead, he will journey into an unexpected, and very foreign territory, one where the boundary between the self and the other becomes dangerously interchangeable. Much like the works of Auster and Murakami, The Transentients defies easy categorization: it is a genuinely disturbing psychological novel that borders on the uncanny. A bewitching puzzle-box with a propulsive plot, as well as a high-wire act of prose, a metaphysical mystery lies at its core that ensnares both the protagonist and the reader. Stretching from the streets of Santiago onto a treacherous escarpment in the Chilean Andes and to the hills of Valparaiso, and then careening out into the vast beckoning of the Atacama desert, The Transentients traverses the porousness of reality . . . and the malleability of consciousness.
Carlos Fuentes called this novel one of the essential Latin American works of the new century: “Missana’s riveting novel throws open a doorway onto the fragility of the self in our time.” Now at last The Transentients is available to an English-speaking audience, thanks in no small part to Jessica Powell’s especially fine translation.
Matt Seidel, THE MILLIONS.COM: ". . . riveting, a tantalizingly suggestive, and immersive read. In the novel, a middle-aged Chilean adman has out-of-body episodes in which he sees and experiences the world through other people’s eyes. (A good neighborly exercise.) Are these chosen vessels—a homeless woman, a stranded mountain climber, a man working on a script for a film set in the Atacama desert—figments of his own personality or clues to some overarching structure, “causal junctions that had not yet been revealed to me but through which I would be able to eventually figure out the rules of the game”?