Camanchaca

Zuniga’s quiet, spare prose has been celebrated in the Spanish language market and this, his US debut, offers a more minimalist aesthetic to what’s on offer in translation in the United States Megan McDowell, Zuniga’s translator, has an extraordinary track record, having worked on some of the most ambitious, and celebrated, Latin American fiction to be published in the US of late.
The novel’s potentially lurid qualities are downplayed and made all the more devastating by Zuniga’s restraint
The alienation and almost suffocating loneliness suffered by the narrator make for an emotional wallop and the reader experiences a deep empathy for him because of it, and because of the evasions he’s offered by the adults in his life, the insufficiency of their empathy for him