Genre: Magical Realism, Novella
Published: Graywolf Press/Charco Press (EN) & Vleugels (NL), first publication 2020.
Rating: 3/5 stars
"A night like this, just like this, only darker."
Not a River opens with three young man, capturing and killing a stingray on their fishing trip on the titular river. In the hazy heat of the afternoon sun, they recall a trip not unlike this one from years ago, which ended in tragedy and encounter the ghosts that have haunted these three men ever since.
Despite its brief length at just under 100 pages, Almada packs this story to the brim with heavy themes. Toxic masculinity, grief, guilt, abortion, and even the political landscape of Argentina are all touched upon. Around it is a dreamlike narrative following the events around the river in a non-linear fashion, tying it all together. With mixed success…
I appreciated many individual elements of this story, but ultimately struggled with all of them put together. In terms of themes, I felt it tried to do too much with the little time and pages it had. Adding to that: the disorienting timeline and the use of magical realism in the form of ghosts was fascinating, but took away from the clarity I felt was needed to do the themes justice.
I usually love short succinct books, but in this case I felt it would’ve benefited from either more page time or a tighter scope.
Full disclosure: I read this book 2x for review-purposes, once in the Dutch translation and once in the English. Aforementioned feelings persisted through both, so I don’t think the translation played a part in this. Both Annie McDermott (English) and Marijke Arijs (Dutch) did incredible jobs of preserving atmosphere and language in translation.
The audiobook for the English version is superbly narrated too, and I can highly recommend this as an immersive experience.
I was provided with both a Dutch- and English (text and audio)-ARC in exchange for an honest review by the publishers. All opinions are my own.
You can find this book here on Goodreads.
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