Read stories Rivka Galshin – Award-winning Canadian writer who lives between Montreal and New York – Great experience. In Daniela Bentancur’s excellent translation, Difference zonethe title of the book and one of the stories (all narrated by the first female characters), encapsulates the general theme: the human condition, defined in a quote by Saint Augustine as “our difference in relation to God… who is outside of time; time is our tragedy.” Thus, it can be said that awareness of the limitations of our time is the focus of everything that happens in the book.
Galshin has an extensive vocabulary that includes terms from fields such as philosophy, mathematics, biology, and finance. Their women move in these areas, but what they do is always surprising because it violates social stereotypes about femininity. The narrators encounter disturbing and seemingly impossible events such as the objects that successively escape from the home of the heroine of “Yesterday’s Empire” and leave her steeped in a difficult nostalgia for the “yesterday” of the title. This makes sense because she has always been more attached to things than people. In this case, the stranger setting is home but there are other possible settings in the group. In American Inventions, for example, this place is the narrator’s body. Her abnormal anatomy corresponds with her love life, which, according to many, is not what it should be: they tell her she lives “as if she were not a woman.”
All of these women react in unexpected ways in situations known as first love in Azul del Bosque; The lack of clear goals in the “lost system”; The couple is in the “zone of difference.” They are all very contemporary and middle or upper class. Galchen’s ideal readers come from those same social groups. The author asks many of her readers: Sometimes, technical vocabulary complicates reading too much for laypeople, as in the case of finance in The Price Scandal.
The central feature of Difference zone It is the fantasy genre: it proposes a recognizable and familiar everyday world, and allows disturbing and incomprehensible events to explode in it, with contradiction as a clear and constant character. The two central paradoxes are the certainty that the past is always present, and the tense relationship between individual consciousness and its root, the universal human condition, bound up with awe and wonder, that lives within every narrator’s voice and echoes in the voice of anyone who approaches them as a reader.
Difference zone
Written by Rivka Galshin
Fjord. Translated by: Daniela Bentancur
224 pages, $30,000