Book Description
January is the story of a 16-year-old farmworker named Nefer. In the Argentine pampas, all things bow to Nefer. Reeds nod when she digs her heels into her horse, unripe peaches snap and fall as she gallops past. Sickly-sweet air bends, churns in Nefer’s throat. Nefer measures the distance between her body and the table, and feels something filling her up, turning against her. Her belly swells. Desperate, Nefer visits a local medicine woman who is known to perform abortions but Nefer becomes too afraid to explain why she is truly there. She attends confession at church but cannot confide in the priest. During a fierce argument with her mother, she finally blurts out her secret. A radical feminist text, January was the first Argentine novel to represent rape from the survivor’s perspective and to explore the life-threatening risks pregnancy posed in a society where abortion was both outlawed and taboo. With a narcotic musicality and voice scorched through with honesty, Gallardo hangs before us an experience that has been lived and ignored a thousand times over. Nefer closes her eyes. We careen to her and we see.
A crystalline and tightly-wound story of a young woman's tenacious desire for her own freedom and the rigid, Catholic community that is unable to recognize her as a full human being. Elegant and forceful--I couldn't put it down.— Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X
One of my favorite Argentinian authors.— Samanta Schweblin
Sara Gallardo’s work possesses such radical originality it would be most appropriate to categorize it with the kind of literature that doesn’t seem like anything else, that doesn't even fit the canon of the established heterodoxy, and that will always be read as a discovery.— Martín Kohan
Unwanted pregnancy, the original horror story, is rendered here with perfect banality, urgency, and dread: the complete nightmare of being trapped in a body subject to both arbitrary social rules and the ruthless passage of time.— Elisa Albert
Sara Gallardo's perfect pitch harmonizes with marginalized voices such as Nefer's without ever reducing her to a victim. I often attempt to channel Gallardo's quiet perceptiveness and rebellious prose.— Maria Sonia Cristoff
Sara Gallardo's story bursts with intensity, as a young country girl in Argentina confronts the dreadful fact of an unwanted pregnancy. In her desperation, she sees the landscape, her family, her neighbors, become a phantasmagoric world filled with terror. Nefer's sensitive consciousness is the lens through which we view her situation, as well as the village life surrounding her, all transformed by dread. This is an exciting, unusual excursion into the mind of a girl whose future has suddenly become a nightmare.— Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Sara Gallardo's perfect pitch harmonizes with marginalized voices such as Nefer's without ever reducing them to victims. A unique example of rebellious prose and subtlety.— María Sonia Cristoff
[January], along with Annie Erneaux’s vital book, Happening, and movies such as Portrait of a Lady on Firei, show us the importance of support, and the dangers that come when abortions are sought through sketchy means . . . I’m so grateful for the work Riddle and Shaughnessy have done on the translation. I recommend this book to everyone.— Tracey Ann Thompson
Rightfully considered a masterpiece of Argentinean literature . . . a powerful examination of class, gender and societal pressure . . . A tour-de-force.— Leo Boix, Morning Star
