Growing up on a Cuba-esque Caribbean island, Casandra, Calia, and Caleb endure life under two tyrannies: that of their parents, and the Island’s authoritarian dictator, Pop-Pop Mustache. Papa was the dictator's former right-hand man. Now, he’s a political pariah and an ugly parody of a tyrant, treating his home as a nation which he rules with an iron fist. As for Mom, his wife and hateful second in command, she rules from the mind. Obsessed with armchair psychoanalysis, she spends her days reading self-help books and seeks to diagnose the kids, and perhaps even herself.
But within these walls, a rebellion is fomenting. Casandra, a cynical, self-important teenager with the most unlikely of attractions, recruits Caleb, meek yet gifted with a deadly touch, to join her in an insurrection against their father’s arbitrary totalitarianism. Meanwhile, Calia, the silent, youngest sibling who just wants to be left alone to draw animals, may be in league with the flies—whose swarm in and around the house grows larger as Papa’s violence increases.
Equal parts Greek tragedy and horror, with a touch of J.D. Salinger and Luis Buñuel, The Tyranny of Flies is a biting and wholly original subversive masterpiece that examines the inherent violence of authority and the frightening and indelible links between patriarchy, military, and family.
Translated from the Spanish by Kevin Gerry Dunn
The Tyranny of Flies by Elaine Vilar Madruga was published by HarperVia on 18 July 2024 and is translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn
As part of this #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour I am delighted to share an extract from the book with you today
Extract from Tyranny of the Flies by Elaine Vilar Madruga
translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn
The flies talk to us, okay? This is fly country. Flies fly all around us, a nation of ideas buzzity buzz buzzing above Calia’s head. She’s unfazed, as usual, focused on her drawing of an elephant. The drawing, anatomically precise, isn’t just the product of boredom and the summer heat. Calia never even looks up. One of the fattest flies lands on her fore- head and wends its way over the pores and hairs and sweat droplets, flaps its wings, cleans them, what a lovely spot it’s chosen to watch the action, to contemplate the elephant draw- ing, to admire and extemporize upon Calia’s artistry and offer a thoughtful critique of her work. For example, the fly might remark that the elephant in the drawing is more than just a realist rendering of the original pachyderm, it might observe that the elephant is actually flawless, so perfect it’s practically alive, and the fly might wonder if, any moment now, an invis- ible curtain will drop down Calia’s sheet of paper, a closing flourish in the miraculous process by which the elephant draws breath and takes solid form. The fly dreams of landing atop the elephant’s hulking gray mass. A beautiful mass. Notes of dung.
The fly waits on Calia’s forehead.
An exercise in patience.
Do the flies dream of her drawings?
We do.
Just three years old. No, not the flies. The flies are much younger than my sister.
No one remembers when Calia started drawing. At this point, we just assume she was born with a paintbrush in hand and made her first watercolor with strokes of blood, amniotic fluid, and the mucus plug. I guess some anatomical masterpiece must’ve emerged from her experience in the birth canal; in any case, she never stopped, and the drawings keep multiplying like ants.
Her oeuvre can be studied, like any other genius’s, according to her obsessions. Calia only draws animals. Like I said (and the flies are clearly also interested), her drawings aren’t clumsy doodles like you’d expect from a kid her age, the page sinking under the weight of so much colored wax; they’re fucking perfection.
She started with insects. Ants were her favorite. And spiders. I’d say that was her darkest period. Drawings of predatory ants and spiders at the exact moment they dismembered their prey, a victim that was no longer animal but merely an object of the hunt, caught in a state of limbo between the jaws of death and the remote possibility of escape.
Then came the birds. Mostly sparrows. It’s easy to understand the rationale behind that pictorial decision. The only birds Calia has ever seen are the few emaciated sparrows that still fly in this country, fenced in by hunger and heat, sparrows with hearts as small as the pad of your little finger, sparrows that go into cardiac arrest and expire in people’s gardens. After that, Calia moved on to monkeys. Monkeys with big fat asses. Veiny and bulbous, swaths of reds and purples. Those monkey butts brought an explosion of color to Calia’s formerly sober pages.
And that brings us to today. Her elephant period. Thankfully, Calia hasn’t yet considered what the genitals of an elephant in heat look like. She’s just focused on their hooves, the shades of gray in their wrinkles and scars, the spindly hairs on their trunks.
Elaine Vilar Madruga is a playwright, poet, and one of the foremost young novelists in
Cuba.
She has a degree in Playwriting from the Higher Institute of Art (ISA), has published over thirty books, and her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies around the globe.
The Tyranny of Flies is her first work to receive widespread attention throughout the wider Spanish-speaking world, winning Spain's Cálamo Prize for "Book of the Year.”
She lives in Havana.
Kevin Gerry Dunn is a Spanish/English translator whose projects include
COUNTERSEXUAL MANIFESTO by Paul B. Preciado and EASY READING by Cristina Morales (for which he received a PEN/Heim Grant, a PEN Translates Award and a residency at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre), as well as works by Daniela Tarazona, Ousman Umar and Cristian Perfumo. His shorter translations have appeared in Granta, Financial Times, Michigan Quarterly Review, Latin American Literature Today and Asymptote.
He also heads the FTrMP Project, an effort to make Spanish translations of vital migration paperwork available for free online. He holds an M.A. in Hispanic Language and Literature and a B.A. in Spanish and English, both from Boston University.
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