Humiliation - Supernormal Reads

No cover — Megan McDowell, Paulina Flores: Humiliation (2019, Oneworld Publications)

272 pages

English language

Published Jan. 8, 2019 by Oneworld Publications.

ISBN:: 978-1-78607-504-8
OCLC Number:: 1089983353

(1 review)

Pride and disgrace. Nostalgia and revenge. Tenderness and seduction.

From the dusty backstreets of Santiago and the sun-baked alleyways of impoverished fishing villages to the dark stairwells of urban apartment blocks, Paulina Flores paints an intimate picture of a world in which the shadow of humiliation, of delusion, seduction and sabotage, is never far away. This is a Chile we seldom see in fiction.

With an exceptional eye for human fragility, with unfailing insight and extraordinary tenderness, Humiliation is a mesmerising collection from a rising star of South American literature, translated from the Spanish by Man Booker International Prize finalist Megan McDowell.

4 editions

ralentina reviewed Humiliation by Megan McDowell

Nine ways to feel humiliated

4 stars

As one could guess from the title, this is a book about humiliation, with each short story exploring a different face of this sentiment. The hints in the blurb that it is somehow about the dictatorship are misleading, and I started to think all Chilean are marketed as dictatorship-related out of laziness or maybe because it supposedly sells. But I am going off a tangent. Almost all the stories are told from the perspective of children. I particularly liked the title story Humiliation (about a girl witnessing his unemployed dad being humiliated, and for the first time being able to interpret what has happened), Talcahuano (about being very young poor but not so unhappy in Talcahuano, and then getting old enough to lose the bless of obliviousness and being disappointed in one's parent and moving to Santiago to lead a poor and not so happy life) and the Last Vacation …

As one could guess from the title, this is a book about humiliation, with each short story exploring a different face of this sentiment. The hints in the blurb that it is somehow about the dictatorship are misleading, and I started to think all Chilean are marketed as dictatorship-related out of laziness or maybe because it supposedly sells. But I am going off a tangent. Almost all the stories are told from the perspective of children. I particularly liked the title story Humiliation (about a girl witnessing his unemployed dad being humiliated, and for the first time being able to interpret what has happened), Talcahuano (about being very young poor but not so unhappy in Talcahuano, and then getting old enough to lose the bless of obliviousness and being disappointed in one's parent and moving to Santiago to lead a poor and not so happy life) and the Last Vacation (about the well meaning efforts to "rescue" a child from poverty and the working-class condition, and the boomerang effect of said child's pride and loyalty to his mum. I was happy to find a good book about Chile.