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Summary
Summary
Through war and its aftermaths, a woman fights to keep her daughters safe.
As a girl she sees her village sacked and her beloved father and brothers flee. Her life in danger, she joins the rebellion in the hills, where her comrades force her to give up the baby she conceives. Years later, having outlived countless men, she leaves to find her lost daughter, travelling across the Atlantic with meagre resources. She returns to a community riven with distrust, fear and hypocrisy in the wake the revolution. Hernandez' narrators have the level gaze of ordinary women reckoning with extraordinary hardship. Denouncing the ruthless machismo of combat with quiet intelligence, Slash and Burn creates a suspenseful, slow-burning revelation of rural life in the aftermath of political trauma.
Author Notes
Claudia Hernández is the highly acclaimed author of five short story collections. Her work has appeared in various anthologies in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Israel and the USA. She was the winner of the Anna Seghers Foundation award (2004), which acknowledges authors interested in making a more just and more humane society through their artistic production. The National Endowment for the Arts has supported the English translation of some of her books that explore the brutal impact of the El Salvadorian Civil War. Hernández won the prestigious Juan Rulfo Prize in 1998 and was one of Hay's Bogota 39 authors in 2007. She currently teaches at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA) in El Salvador.
Julia Sanches translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Noemi Jaffe, Daniel Galera, Claudia Hernández, and Geovani Martins, among others. Her translations for And Other Stories include Now and at the Hour of Our Death by Susana Moreira Marques and the forthcoming Permafrost by Eva Baltasar. She is a founding member of the Cedilla & Co. translators' collective, and currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Salvadoran writer Hernández mines the traumatic aftermath of an unnamed Latin American country's civil war for a wrenching story of three generations of women including an ex-guerrilla combatant and her four daughters, all unnamed. While fighting as a guerrilla in the mountains, the combatant becomes pregnant and is forced to give up her firstborn daughter for adoption. Decades after the war, the now ex-combatant searches for her daughter in France, where the daughter was raised by adoptive parents, leaving behind her three other daughters. One was raised primarily by the ex-combatant's mother, and the ex-combatant's feelings of guilt over the war, along with her resentment toward her own mother's neglect, eddy through the narrative of her search. While initially challenging, the series of nameless female narrators, nameless places, and indirect speech render a certain universality and anonymity to the characters, and, coupled with the crystalline descriptions of postwar devastation, the technique dramatically underscores the horrific context of Cold War--era civil wars in Latin America, from the ever-present threat of rape and murder by marauding soldiers during the conflict to the present-day tension and distrust. Multilayered and consistently engrossing, Hernández's knockout novel is not to be missed. (Jan.)
Guardian Review
In her 1983 book Salvador, Joan Didion wrote that El Salvador during its 13-year civil war was "not a culture in which a high value is placed on the definite", but that "terror is the given of the place". Both characteristics are vividly honoured in Claudia Hernández's Slash and Burn. It shares with Anna Burns's Milkman a focus on how women cope in a conflict made by men; like Milkman, this is a story that could come from only one place, but is carefully unspecific in its details, leaving country and characters unnamed. At its heart is a woman who joins a guerrilla movement, becoming a compañera in the war after suffering abuse by soldiers who terrorise the locals. But the horrors of her experience are a prelude, and most of the book is about the future that during the fighting seemed unreachable. Several years after the war, the woman has four daughters, though one of them lives in Paris, having been sold to a French family to fund the insurgent cause (there is no "good" side here). Paris represents another world, elusive yet containing everything the woman desires. We see-saw with her through hope and despair: when her daughter does come home for a time, it's only to tour the country talking to other families who have also lost children. The novel is controlled and defined by its style: long, tightly knitted paragraphs of intricate memories with no direct speech. The sustained interiority of the narrative makes for an intensive reading experience, but it's a tribute both to Hernández's careful structure and to Julia Sanches's translation that the reader is only briefly disoriented each time the narrative passes from mother to daughter to sister. Men, whose best option during the war was to be a deserter, remain largely absent afterwards, and make themselves unwelcome when they do appear. What Slash and Burn - named after a method of agriculture both destructive and regenerative - shows is the difficulty of creating a new life after war or other trauma. The mother is unsure how to identify herself: with her nom de guerre or her birth name? Has life returned to normal, or begun anew? Her daughters struggle with the opportunities for education and travel that the "success" of the war has opened for them. Because all in all, we are powerfully reminded, "none of it was under their control. It may never have been."
Kirkus Review
In an unnamed Central American country, a teenage girl fights a yearslong civil war during which she bears several daughters. When it's over, she struggles to find a way to shed the soldier and embrace the mother. The protagonist is nameless, referred to only as "she" or "her" or later "the mother"; the other characters, mostly female, are called "her mother," "her daughter," "her sister," "her aunt." The book feels both startlingly profound and, later, confusing as it drags on too long, with barely any dialogue to break up the text. The girl first learns to put a gun together at 13 when her father teaches her how to protect their family before he leaves to join "the catechists" in the war against the state. She soon decides to follow him to the mountains and takes up with a much older man there. When she has her first daughter, her commanders send the baby away, to be sold by nuns to a couple from Paris. Though the woman has two more daughters by her eventual husband from the war and another daughter by a different man after her husband's death, she never gives up on her firstborn and finally finds a way to her after the war's official end. Though there are no men in her life by now and she's the sole provider for her daughters, she's still on guard and following phantom orders. The mother, whose endless practicality, resilience, and independence are the backbone of the novel, cuts through the violence, poverty, and petty cruelties of the men and ex-combatants in her community to give her daughters their best chance. A story about a mother's resilience in a postwar country is let down by its sometimes impenetrable form. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
