The Rooftop

By Fernanda Trías

In a rundown apartment building, in an unnamed city in Uruguay, a father and daughter close themselves off from the world.

"The world is this house," says Clara, and the rooftop becomes their last recess of freedom. A pet canary is their only witness. 

As Clara’s connection to the outside is stripped away—the neighbor who stops coming by, the lover whose existence is only known by a pregnancy—desperation and paranoia take hold. It's a stifling embrace, and we are there with her, our narrator, dreading what we know the future holds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charco Press
• Release date: Oct 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913867058

Fernanda Trías

Fernanda Trías was born in Uruguay and is the award-winning author of three novels, two of which have been published in English. She is also the author of the short story collection No soñarás flores and the chapbook El regreso. A writer and instructor of creative writing, she holds an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She was awarded the National Uruguayan Literature Prize, The Critics’ Choice Award Bartolomé Hidalgo, and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz International Prize in Mexico for her novel Pink Slime. Both The Rooftop and Pink Slime were awarded the British PEN Translates Award, and Pink Slime was chosen by The New York Times in Spanish as one of the ten best books of 2020. Translation rights for her work have been sold in fifteen languages. She currently lives in Bogotá, Colombia, where she is a teacher at the creative writing MFA program of Instituto Caro y Cuervo. In 2017, she was selected as Writer-in-Residence at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, where she started writing her latest novel, Pink Slime.

Book preview

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‘One of the most unsettling and suggestive Latin American writers today. (…) Trías is insatiable and a great storyteller.’

El Cultural

‘An extraordinary novel.’

Giuseppe Caputo

‘An intense and dark novel with luminous writing: I admit to being dazzled.’

Liliana Heker

‘Fernanda Trías has crafted a unique world that we feel ineluctably drawn to.’

La Vanguardia

‘Trías narrates what seems to be impossible to narrate: the seeds of pain, the trembling feat that is the attachment to life.’

Giovanna Rivero

‘Fernanda Trías cuts her phrases with a scalpel to get to the very marrow of language.’

La voz de Galicia

‘Family, intimacy, and madness intertwine in this exceptional story by Trías.’

Revista Ñ

‘Many read The Rooftop like a disturbing love story between a daughter and her father, but it is much more than that. It's the genesis of everything that Trías would move on to write.’

WMagazín

The Rooftop

Fernanda Trías

THE Rooftop

Translated by

Annie McDermott

If they came right now they’d find me face-up on the bed, in the same position I collapsed down in around midnight. Eleven thirty-eight, to be precise: the time when I last looked at the clock and the time when everything ended. I gave Flor a kiss, told her to sleep tight, and she closed her eyes like it was just another night.

The candle guttered out a while ago, and now the darkness is swallowing the walls. It’s almost as if the whole world knew and was lying in wait just for me. I’m not sure what time it is, but the later it gets the less frightened I feel, and the less I feel of anything at all. Whatever happens, they’ll have to break down the door, because I put the chain on and wedged the chest of drawers against it. Dad and Flor are in the other room and in a funny way they’re keeping each other company. Not me. I don’t have anyone, but I’m determined to stay awake.

I hear a siren in the distance: an ambulance or a police car, I can never tell which. As it draws closer, my heart pounds in my chest. The sound turns shrill and leaves me shellshocked as it goes by under the window. Red light flashed onto the walls for a moment, like tiny flame-figures dancing in the air. Now the siren fades as well, and I’m back in the shadowy silence of the room. Alone. I have to convince myself that what’s in the other room isn’t a man, isn’t Dad. Tucked up together it was like they were sleeping.

It’s hard to believe I had a life before this one, a job, a flat, which I now remember nothing about. For me, real life began with Julia’s death, went on for four years and came to an end today.

The bird smell had taken over Dad’s bedroom. Some days I opened the window to air it out, but the air had got used to staying put, like a whirlwind stuck in purgatory. When I mentioned this, he said it was my fault, for keeping the window closed for months on end.

‘Well, whenever I opened it you’d start screaming for help like a maniac. Three times I saved you from getting carted off to the loony bin.’

That was in the beginning, the days when he yelled at me every time I went in with his food. Once he even faked a choking fit. His face swelled up from coughing so much and he flailed his arms like a giant dragonfly. Gradually, with time, he gave up on yelling. Maybe he learned to love me a little; or maybe it was because of Flor, though he took a while to come round to all that.

I read a long time ago that a twelve-week-old foetus is the same size as an orange. The photo in the book showed a black rectangle with a fuzzy white half-moon floating in the middle. If I turned the page sideways, it looked like a smile or a winking eye. Those months and the ones leading up to them, when Dad was calm and didn’t shout, were a happy time. The baby would move and even speak, with a purring sound only I could hear. Back then I had a wild hope that lasted until after Flor was born. Then it began to fall away, and I didn’t even notice.

I was patient with Dad. I wanted him to touch my belly and listen to the soft burbling noises coming from inside me, but I waited a bit longer before asking him. One day I made up my mind and went into his room. It was an unusual time, mid-afternoon, and Dad stared when he saw me empty-handed. He was lying on his right side, on top of the blankets, with one elbow on the pillow. I went over and lifted up my sweater.

‘See how it’s grown,’ I said, showing him my belly. ‘Sixteen weeks.’

He didn’t even look. He closed his eyes, turned over in bed and lay motionless with his face to the wall. I don’t know why he got into those moods. One day he’d be fine and make room for me on the bed, and the next he wouldn’t even speak to me. It had got worse after I told him about the baby, that soon we were going to have one just for us.

‘We’ll be a family again,’ I said, but he didn’t take it well and pouted like a petulant child.

Dad could be like that when he wanted to be, sulky and more stubborn than anyone.

I suppose the flat didn’t help. The bedroom never got any direct light, just a faint glimmer when the sun shone hard on the big church wall opposite. On those days, the bird sang more than ever. Dad would sit up slightly in bed, facing the cage, and toss birdseed at it like old men do in town squares. The same weary, blank expression: the stiff body and a single arm moving by itself.

The church wall, that grey ocean wave that blocks the view from both windows, has always blighted our life. Dad wouldn’t tell me if the church was built before or after Julia bought the flat. I was four when we moved here and all I remember is the bustle of removal men carrying furniture up the stairs. Amid the chaos of dust and boxes, I wandered in circles like a little blind hen, colliding with the workers’ hairy legs. I searched the forest of limbs for Dad’s, but I couldn’t tell which they were. That’s all I remember. The rest I forgot or never took in. As for the wall, nothing.

Carmen says Julia could have bought a flat near the beach.

‘She was a fool not to,’ she told me one day.

I think Julia felt protected by the shadow of the wall. She never went to mass on Sundays; she preferred having the church to herself and used to go over during the siesta, when most people forget about saints. She sat in the pews at the back and gazed at the air; I suppose she was hoping something special would happen. It was physical proximity that mattered to her: getting as close as she could to God’s back. Maybe she thought she was safe from harm next to that big church wall. But she was wrong. Sometimes I went with Julia to church. I crawled around under the pews until my tights were grubby and laddered at the knees. I liked the smell of the fresh varnish, especially if I could pick off the hard little beads and suck on them like sweets. Julia prayed or stared straight ahead. The air is so strange inside churches. Sticky and thick with presences.

I don’t know when everything started to go wrong, or what set the end in motion. At one point I thought it was the pregnancy. Now, with nothing left to do but look back, I don’t think there was ever a beginning, just one long ending that devoured us bit by bit. If I’m remembering all this tonight, it’s only because I want a little more time with them. No one could possibly understand how I feel: isolated, expecting nothing, knowing I’m locked in a desperate battle to defend something that’s already gone.

Five or six months pregnant, no more: I was in the kitchen cooking meat for myself and carrot purée for Dad, who only ever ate vegetables. Just that morning I’d told him he was going to turn into a canary if he carried on like that, and fly away through the window. I was laughing when I said it. He didn’t answer, but

Reviews for The Rooftop

[lisa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fernanda is a wonderful writer! This book made me feel sick and claustrophobic at times and that was probably intentional.

[Luisafcl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I got quite hooked. It can be read in one sitting and still appreciate all the good work of the author in describing the protagonist's psychological world.
The fragility of the mental state in moments of complete vulnerability. The complexity of the relationship with her father and how from there her end begins.
Despite that ending, I felt empathy for her.
Recommended book!

February, 2023 (Translated from Spanish)

[Kevin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Rooftop is a book that addresses a dark theme; however, it does so with a particular beauty resulting from the literary skill of its author, Fernanda Trías.

As the story progresses, it reveals details that allow us to understand the mental state of its protagonist, while also drawing connections to help us understand how she arrives at the moment narrated at the beginning of the story.

Recommended. (Translated from Spanish)

[G. Munckel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Clara feels increasingly stalked by the outside world: the outside is hostile, other people are a threat. And this sickly fear pushes her to isolate herself more and more in her apartment. But she is not alone: her father, now old; her daughter, barely a baby; and a caged canary are also there. In her effort to protect them, she deprives them of everything that is outside, like the pier her father wants to visit again, the little birds her daughter wants to see. For Clara, protection takes the form of confinement that goes to the utmost consequences. In this novel, Fernanda Trías addresses one of her recurring themes: the relationship between mother and daughter. But she also deals with the loneliness of a troubled mind seen from the inside, the conflict between the present and memory, the changes in the body as time passes, the courage when there is nothing left. And in the midst of all that loneliness, amid all that fear, she finds ways to narrate moments of beauty. (Translated from Spanish)

[VanessaS · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What happens when, in a moment of extreme weakness, you fall into the hands of the wrong person? Clara, the main narrative character, disturbs her father's life with her madness and fears. He, defenseless, is led towards the darkest perversion. The novel feels short, even though the story is not easy, because the author knows how to maintain the tension. It also feels short negatively; as a reader, I would have liked the author to explore more thoroughly the origins of the daughter's obsessions. In Spain, the book is published by Tránsito: a new publisher that debuts with this book and has already released five prints at this time. I recommend it. (Translated from Spanish)

[maguita000 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What to do when the outside world turns hostile? How do we respond to a world that seems unsettling to us?

Clara, the protagonist and narrator, immerses us in a dense, delirious world always on the brink of subjective catastrophe. The rooftop unfolds between the walls of a crumbling house, where Clara, her sick father, and her little daughter coexist entrenched. In the protagonist, there is no room for the outside; that is where the bad, the threatening, and the disturbing reside. Immersed in terrors, losing the fragile thread that connects her to reality and haunted by a dark past hinted at, Clara will find herself at a fatal crossroads.

The claustrophobic atmosphere, the hermetic silence, and the constant tension conveyed by the narration produce in the reader an anguishing and desolate effect.

I had long wanted to read this novel by the Uruguayan author Trías, and I loved it. It touches on the theme of madness with subtlety, without caricatures, without resorting to the crude. (Translated from Spanish)

[Nebulosa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The writer is a woman: "Fernanda". And yes, it is a phenomenal read that takes us through the passages of a mind that lives enclosed and wrapped in a paranoia expressed through her jumpy, nervous behavior, which reaches the point of being harmful to the family members around her...
A part of simplified human psychology in a book to digest with a quick read, not without first noticing details of her past that will have relevance in her present.
Highly recommended, remember that "The Rooftop" refers to our "head" and how it moves to extremes and looks into abysses filled with ideas wanting to make decisions that may be rushed, very conscious, or simply throwing oneself into them without looking back. (Translated from Spanish)

[Crisara · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A story where one dives into a mind dominated by fear. I liked it and it felt too short to me? (Translated from Spanish)