“Keeping up with Wiener is one of the few luxuries we have left.†- Alejandro Zambra
A left-wing politician and victim of lawfare finds herself behind bars in a high-security prison deep in the Amazon. She calls herself Atusparia, after a nineteenth-century Peruvian indigenous leader and the staunchly communist school where she studied during the waning days of the Cold War. But love in the times of capitalism devolved into a spiral of drugs and frenzied sexual encounters that led her astray from her ideals, until she felt called back to her roots. A pilgrimage on foot to Lake Titicaca inspired her to rename herself after the revolutionary heroine of her youth.
No precedents come to mind for Gabriela Wiener’s latest novel. Atusparia is sui generis: satirical, auto-fictional and vaguely futuristic. Somewhere between social realism and poetic fantasy, Wiener takes her craft to new heights and shows us, in this post-indigenist “great Russian novel,†how hierarchies and power struggles can corrode freedom movements from the inside.
