Argentine writer Aurora Venturini was 85 when she received the Premio Nueva Novela for The nieces, which she had submitted anonymously. She finally got the recognition she craved, with this eccentric, fascinating story with equally eccentric and fascinating characters.
At The nieces Yuna tells of her monstrous family of 'misfits'. Yuna herself is feeble-minded and her younger sister Betina is mute and severely physically and mentally challenged, and rides around broomlessly in a wheelchair with a hole in it so that her faeces can drain into it. Yuna is disgusted with her, so when feeding her, she deliberately sticks the spoon in her eye, ear or nose before it ends up in her 'maw'.
But other family members are also maladjusted, such as her "imbecile nieces" Carina and Petra: the eldest has six toes on her feet and outgrowths on her hands resembling an extra finger, the youngest is a lilliputian. When Carina is impregnated by a neighbour and dies after being forced to have an abortion, Petra takes revenge in no uncertain terms. And Yuna does so, in a very different way, too, when Betina is made pregnant by Yuna's former art-school teacher, who then turns up as a family friend. A retarded girl in a wheelchair having a child by a man who is already almost retired - little good can come of that, you would think. And then it doesn't.
Yuna and her cousin Petra are allies, trying to turn life for the better in the midst of all this chaos; Yuna by creating a furore as an artist, Petra by making money with the world's oldest profession. But Yuna cannot really depend on anyone.
In the preface, author Marianna Enriquez, then one of the judges who awarded the book, describes her alienation, confusion and admiration when she The nieces read for the first time. It is indeed a novel unlike any you have read before. Yuna, with her unusual way of speaking, using hardly any full stops and commas, is a unique protagonist, who can come off as harsh and cruel as she is humorous, and captures your heart. 'Literature that gushes like blood,' says Enriquez, and that is true in more ways than one. Not only because of the deformity, filth and death in the story, but also because of the lavish, vivid, radical style.
According to Aurora Venturini herself The nieces an autobiographical book. "All my creations are monstrous. My family was very monstrous. That's what I know." One can hope that was only partly true.
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