Join us at the Texas Book Festival, where Rodrigo Hasbún will discuss his book The Invisible Years.
Novelas de aprendizaje en traducción
Acompaña a los autores Xita Rubert y Rodrigo Hasbún para reflexionar y dialogar sobre sus novelas conmovedoras acerca de los secretos de la niñez. Los hechos de Key Biscayne (The Key Biscayne Affair) de Xita Rubert sigue a una narradora poco confiable en viaje a una isla en la Florida, donde la vida social e irresponsable de su padre convierte a la hija de testigo en cómplice. En Los años invisibles (The Invisible Years), una llamada súbita reúne a Andrea y Julián después de veintiún años, obligándolos a enfrentar las heridas de sus adolescencias de clase acomodada en Bolivia y el escándalo que rompió los vínculos entre sus amigos.
Time, Truth & Trauma: The Art of Growing Up in Fiction
Join authors Rodrigo Hasbún and Emeline Atwood for a discussion about trauma, truth and the harsh realities of adulthood. Hasbún’s The Invisible Years transports readers from 1990s Bolivia to present-day Houston, as two childhood friends reconnect after an unexpected phone call forces them to revisit the scandal that tore them apart twenty one years ago. Atwood’s debut novel, A Real Animal, follows Lucy into young adulthood as she reckons with the trauma of a sexual assault and struggles to navigate romantic relationships, intimacy, and connection alongside an urgent pull towards the unknowable and the extraordinary.
“It’s impossible to get a single answer from the past. It’s not a key to anything. It’s just a place we go to trick ourselves.”
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.