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This isn't as wild a ride as The Adventures of China Iron, but it's close. The Slum Virgin is a mishapen cement statue of the Virgin Mary that speaks to Cleopatra, a trans prostitute, and guides her in transforming her shantytown. We hear Cleo's side of these conversations, which land somewhere between prayer and gossipy chitchat. This Virgin Mary isn't particularly prudish - El Poso gets a clean up, but the hard-partying carnality still flourishes. At least until it all crashes down. The author...
I love getting recommendations in bookshops: hand-written notes in Waterstones' branches, personal suggestions from Mel at Drake’s in Stockton and whenever I’m in Edinburgh I make a beeline for The Golden Hare in Stockbridge. The lovely staff there directed me to the elegant and rewarding collection from brand new Charco Press. Through the “grimy gates of poverty”, a journalist and a photographer, enter the intoxicating world of El Poso, a Buenos Aires slum: noisy, colourful, smelly, depraved, a...
I would actually like to give this 7.5/10. The 5 star system is too limiting but I digress. I have wanted to expand my reading to other parts of the world and to different writing styles. Well this certainly fit the bill. A rather bizarre, and uniquely told tale of sex, drugs, violence and opera, with a transvestite and the Virgin Mary thrown in for good measure.
Awaiting book club. This one was my selection. I have no idea what the others will think.
La Virgen Cabeza (2009) is a powerful short novel by Argentinian writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara. A woman journalist, Qüity, frequents a slum on the outskirts of Buenos Aires in search of stories. She is fascinated by the charismatic leader of the inhabitants, a former transvestite prostitute, Cleopatra. Cleo has had a vision of the Virgin Mary after being beaten up and gang-raped in a police station. Her spirituality helps her become the spiritual leader of the community. Qüity watches in admira...
I absolutely loved it, you need to be truly proficient in Spanish though, there's a lot of slang and you'd miss the humour in it otherwise. I strongly recommend this Argentine "new" writer.
"If the people don't understand the power they'd have if they only joined together, what the hell do a bunch of rats know?"Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's writing is vivid and powerful. Slum Virgin is not for the faint of heart, but then again neither is the resilience and faith of those who live in the slums of Buenos Aires. All walks of life of come to live with transvestite turned saint Cleopatra, after she has received a message from a statue of the Virgin Mary to create a utopia in El Poso. When
El Poso was the kingdom of eternal youth: no one dies of old age, they die of curable diseases or unnecessary bullets.Slum Virgin is the story of two women - Quity, a journalist who visits the poverty-stricken and violent neighborhood of El Poso in search of a story, and Cleopatro "Cleo", a trans sex worker who became the medium of the Virgin Mary after a horrific act of violence against her.Many people begin to follow Cleo after her "miracles", and Quity soon begins to fall for the subject of h...
Whether you're swept along by the tidal wave of colorful, destitute characters, and harrowing and outrageous events in this novel, might depend largely on whether you're convinced by the voices of the narrators. I was, and was quickly drawn into the misadventures of Quilty and Cleo, as they navigated horrific times in the slum, their surprising and ribald relationships, and the bizarre concluding outcomes (cumbia opera? Cuban mission? what?), barely touched on and all the more intriguing.I can't...
Not for the squeamish: this novel will push at the boundaries of your discomfort, with graphic descriptions of sex and violence, including a lot of rapes and murders. But it's set in Buenos Aires's slums, so the intent is more to reflect what life and death really are like there, rather than for gratuitous shock value. The translator did a splendid job, moving with agility between dozens of different registers and genres, from coarse street-speak to pretentious high literary references to folk o...
Wow. What a whirlwind this was. Cabezón Cámara’s novel The Adventures of China Iron has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and Charco Press offered a discount to get both that and Slum Virgin together so I leapt at the chance. I decided to start with this, and absolutely loved it.Quity is a journalist, and working with Dani, a photographer who uses his camera to show the colour of people’s souls, she decides to investigate a slum where Cleo, a large than life transvestite, talks...
Slum Virgin (2017) was translated by Frances Riddle from Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's La Virgen Cabeza (2009) and published by the wonderful Charco Press. Indeed this completes my reading of their entire list to date, and sets me up for my 2019 subscription, which includes another Gabriela Cabezón Cámara book.Slum Virgin is one of the more unusual of their books and I'm a little at a loss what to make of it (not necessarily a bad thing).It centres around the story of Cleo, who narrates part of the
The 2 rating here means I didn’t feel like I wasted my time, but I wouldn’t read it again or recommend it.In the beginning, I was rather disoriented by the way it jumped around. Clearly introducing the characters would have helped. (Maybe Quity could have chatted about each of them like you may introduce someone to someone else, when you don’t just say the name but a little bit about them. Having the name Cleo for two characters didn’t help.)Overall, the writing was kind of rambling. I get that
A dense read that took longer than I expected. It's the not-always-linear tale of a female journalist who gets caught up with a religious revival in a Buenos Aires slum led by a transexual former hooker who speaks to the Virgin Mary. There's a good bit of violence and sex and quite a bit about getting psychologically lost in different ways. Bits of it shone for me, bits of it were close to incomprehensible, and as a whole it mostly worked.