On September 13, 1987, two men entered the abandoned, partially demolished Goiânia Radiotherapy Institute (GRI) in northeastern Brazil. They were looking for metallic junk, as little corroded as possible, the heavier the better because scrap buyers pay by the pound. What they found in the ruined premises of the GRI would unleash “one of the most serious radiological accidents to have occurred to date,” as later classified by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The incident inspired You Glow in the Dark, winner of the 2022 Ribera del Duero Short Story Prize, and the eponymous short story by Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi, in a captivating translation by Chris Andrews (Roberto Bolaño, Cesar Aira).
You Glow in the Dark (New Directions, 2024) is Colanzi’s fourth collection of short stories and the second to be published in English after Jessica Sequira’s excellent translation of Our Dead World (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017). In each book, Colanzi experiments with and expands upon the boundaries of her writing. Here it’s voices—from different contexts and realities, with a wide range of ambition, frustration, and defiance—that populate the pages and spaces of this book. “It is indeed one of the aspects that interests me the most about writing,” said Colanzi when presenting the book on the Hablemos Escritoras podcast, “being able, as if in a kind of Ouija board, to summon other voices, different points of view different from my own.”
In the title story, Colanzi uses seven narrators to tell the story of the Goiânia accident: a girl retells the demolition of her house and the pain that accompanies the loss of dignity; the death of a young girl by radiation becomes controversial when she is openly left to decay; a scientist portrays the fatal ignorance that enabled and accelerated the nuclear disaster. “The thing is . . .” says a female character, “living in Goiânia years after the GRI was converted into a huge convention center . . . we were just coming out of a dictatorship: we had been trained to forget.” It is as if Colanzi is rebelling against the loss of collective memory of tragedy, against the unbearable fact that things go back to normal faster than they should (and even faster if they happen in Latin American contexts), leaving only a few invisible traces from those that survived it.
The interest in the urban, when disturbed by the nuclear, continues in “Atomito.” (For us Latin Americans, diminutives are not exclusive to signs of affection,) In contrast to Atomito—the caricature of a child who serves as the benevolent mascot of the Power Plant, appearing in television ads, stuffed animals, or painted on street walls—the characters in the story are teenagers whose lives have been negatively affected by its omnipresence.
“There are days when the police go into a neighbor’s house, and they can hear shouts and the noise of things smashing. There are days when they drink so much they forget to eat. There are days when they’re hungry but there’s no money or food. There are days when the city wakes wrapped in a fog so thick it’s impossible to make out the shapes of things.”
Although they are not active members of any resistance, their status as inhabitants of El Alto is enough to make them targets of the police and the media, who invariably label them as insurrectionary mobs threatening the law and order of society. This subtle social commentary is enough to read this story in a broader context, not necessarily limited to its genre. It is only after a big explosion in the Plant that one of the characters falls under a spell that forces him to dance all around the city, as in a trance, luring more dancers to crowd the streets in the most cyberpunk uprising the reader could imagine.
“The Cave,” perhaps the strongest piece of the collection, moves beyond pure human subjectivity to explore different creatures and species, including beings of the air, beings of the surface, and creatures of darkness. Its narrative—structured from micro-fragments that accumulate until they form a whole piece—functions as a portal or threshold from which the reader engages in an investigation of temporality that surpasses human experience. Various processes unfold throughout deep time: everything that occurred before the human species inhabited the earth and all that will come after it vanishes.
Unlike what happened in Goiânia, here the temporal jump is bolder and follows no apparent order. Sometimes it even seems that the cave doesn’t maintain a fixed place in space. A pregnant hunting woman urgently seeking to survive—even at the cost of her offspring—appears at the beginning of the story. She is then replaced by another in present-day Oaxaca that will later become a victim of femicide. The narration then goes back to the night that a Dominican friar and a vibrant chrysalis coincide inside the cave, only to mark the beginning of the end of a population of mutant bats. As one character puts it:
“This whole world collapsed with the sudden disappearance of the bats. As in Pickup Sticks, the removal of a single piece brought the whole edifice tumbling down. Quiet times followed, at least for eyes incapable of seeing the bustle of microscopic life. Until a pack of coyotes began to frequent the cave, and the cycle started over: it was like the previous time around but not—it never is—quite the same. The life cycle that turns on shit, on guano, on bountiful excrement: the unwitting gift of one living thing to another, enabling existence to go on. Shit as the link, the fundamental bond in the mosaic of organisms.”
The speed and variety of plots is thrilling, as are the connections the reader can make to geological, biological, zoological, and technological ideas.
While their quality is lower compared to the rest of the book—perhaps due to the vagueness and even incompleteness of their endings and characters—“The Debt,” “Chaco,” and “The Greenest Eyes” maintain the author’s interest in bringing the reader closer to scenes and landscapes that are part of the historical, social, and territorial reality of central South America. “The Debt” takes place in a dying town that had better times when rubber extraction in the Bolivian jungle was synonymous with prosperity and development. In “Chaco”—Quechua for“the hunting land,” a territory that lies between today’s Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina—the action begins with a description of the dispossession suffered by the Matacos at the hands of an oil refinery.
“When Grandpa was young he’d worked with the government people who drove the Matacos off their land. . . . My grandfather was never paid the money they’d promised him for getting rid of the Matacos, money he needed to settle a debt. He lost everything, went bad, became a drunk. That’s what they say.”
The eternal tension between colonizers and colonized and the always difficult and unjust relationship between genetics and social status that still persists in Latin America when it comes to skin color and race is apparent in “The Greenest Eyes” (perhaps a nod to Toni Morrison’s first novel) where the protagonist desires to have the color of his Italian-immigrant father’s eyes, even if the price ends up being too high.
If Mariana Enríquez or Mónica Ojeda placed the horror genre in a central space within contemporary Latin American literature, Liliana Colanzi is one of the Latin American women doing the same for speculative fiction. Following the lineage of previous winners of the Ribera del Duero Prize, such as Guadalupe Nettel and Samanta Schweblin—powerhouses of Latin American contemporary literature—there is promise in Liliana Colanzi’s writing and her interest in constructing the spaces and stories where the social landscape of the Americas flirts with temporal and spatial transmutations. We can only hope that her next work will be a longer installment.
