Roza tumba quema / Claudia Hernandez / 2018
With Roza tumba quema and El Verbo J under her belt, Hernandez is perhaps the Salvadoran novelist who has best captured the pain and aftermath of the Salvadoran Civil War. Roza tumba quema follows a woman, criss-crossing through different eras of her life: as a guerrillera, as a mother fundraising for her daughter’s education, as a mother searching for her long lost daughter, and more. It is told in the dizzying narrative style of Hernandez which forces readers to reconstruct the context as she reads. I trust-fell into the style, sometimes losing track of who I was reading about when, but piecing it together, and the painful attention this takes, does something to the sentiment. Hernandez likes to leave readers unsteady, perhaps to avoid an easy sentimentalization, perhaps to give them a taste of the distress her characters face. In either case, it does little to hamper my sense of awe, gratitude, and desire to reflect over the lifetime Hernandez covers in this work. She writes the novels many others wished they were capable of writing with such finesse and grace. That is, novels that tell the story of an entire people, an era, with urgency and insights that resists simplistic readings of history. 5/5