Description
Book SynopsisOut of the Cage opens in 1956, in Argentina, with the freakish death of Aurora Berro, and descends into a dark philosophical exploration of humanity and mortality. In the midst of her family’s celebration of a national holiday, an LP, careening through the air like a “demented boomerang,” severs her jugular. Her family— an agglomeration of perversions, deformities, and obsessions—seems at first not to notice, singing on. Aurora is left behind in a voyeuristic limbo as an omniscient first-person narrator, to observe the depravity of her family and reflect on the farce of her life and human existence.
Fernanda García Lao has been called “the strangest writer of Argentine literature,” and in Out of the Cage, she lives up to that distinction. The book is saturated in strangeness, a blend of formal experimentation, eroticism, grotesque theatricality, and dark humor that evokes the absurdist fictions of Witold Gombrowicz and the style of Silvina Ocampo. The result is a macabre and fantastic vaudeville, a tragicomedy, a kind of Dadaist opus against ideas of eternal beauty and fixed identity, against absolute concepts and universality.
Trade Review“She's the best there is at portraying absurdity. There's never been anyone like her and nor will there be. Fernanda García Lao is the strangest writer in Argentine literature.” — SILVINA FRIERA, PÁGINA 12
“In her new novel Out of the Cage, Fernanda García Lao composes a delirious story, accompanied by Peronist mysticism and twists that look like science fiction – such as the construction of a kind of female-third-world Frankenstein… the wandering soul that tells this story from an interdimensional space.” — Dolores Pruneda Paz, Télam
