The Woman from Uruguay

Jennifer Croft offers us this English translation of Argentine author Pedro Mairal’s latest novel, which is titled La Uruguaya in the original Spanish. It’s a smooth read. It’s easy to feel that we’re in the skin and the meandering thoughts of the narrator.

Our narrator, Lucas Pereyra, recounts mostly a single Tuesday. We follow his attempted romance with a much younger woman from Uruguay. Pereyra is an unemployed writer from Argentina who is making a trip to Uruguay to pick up advance cash for book deals in Spain and Colombia. A secret bonus to this trip is that Pereyra plans to meet up with the enticing young woman he met and flirted with heavily on a previous visit.

The recounting of this affair—replete with flashes backward and forward—is told in a voice speaking directly to Lucas’ wife, implying she already knows what was going on, just not the explicit details. Readers receiving the explicit details makes for such an intriguingly narrated tale. It’s full of conflict, romance, frustration, regret, pondering, acceptance, and much more. It makes us think about memory—about which ones we desperately attempt to cling to, or perhaps recreate. There’s a fight between fantasy and reality in this great short novel.