PEN World Voices Festival Presents Secrets & Lies: The Hidden Lives of Families
What are the secrets that lurk behind the closed doors of a family’s history, unknown or unexplored even to the family itself? And how far must one run to escape them?
Carol Bensimon’s Diorama (tr. Zoë Perry and Julia Sanches), Rodrigo Hasbún’s The Invisible Years (tr. Lily Meyer), and Bsrat Mezghebe’s I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For all examine attempts to flee buried pasts—whether in Brazil, Bolivia, or Eritrea—and come to terms with their repercussions in a foreign land.
Moderated by writer and critic Anderson Tepper.
Andrea and Julián haven’t seen one another in twenty-one years—not since that tragic, fateful night their senior year of high school that marked their group of friends forever. A shocking phone call brings the two together again in Houston, where they begin to unravel the truth of that year, picking open long scabbed-over wounds from their upper-class adolescence in 1990s Bolivia and the scandal that ripped them apart.
A writer unhappy in his career and his marriage, Julián has been novelizing the past for his next book, trying to make meaning out of the events that changed the course of their lives forever. “I’d thought that writing about that time would free me, relieve the burden of the invisible years,” he writes, “but often it seems that it’s done the reverse.” Juxtaposing the naïve invincibility of adolescence with the grasping uncertainties of adulthood, The Invisible Years deftly weaves a coming-of-age tale that leaves the reader hanging on every word, even as they know how the cards fall in the end.
Rodrigo Hasbún is a Bolivian writer and screenwriter. He is the author of eight works of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel Affections (Simon & Schuster), which received an English PEN Award and has been translated into twelve languages. Named one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists in 2010, Hasbún’s short stories have appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. He lives and works in Houston.