This World Does Not Belong to Us

By Natalia García Freire

Lucas was just a child when his father sold him to another farmer as a laborer. Years later, Lucas returns, full of resentment and burning for revenge.

After years away, Lucas returns uninvited to the home he was expelled from as a child. The garden has been conquered by weeds, which blanket his mother’s beloved flowerbeds and his father’s grave alike. A lot has changed since Eloy and Felisberto were invited into the family home to work for Lucas’s father, long ago. The two hulking strangers have brought the land and everyone on it under their control—and removed nuisances like Lucas. Now everything rots. Lucas, a hardened young man, turns to a world that thrives in dirt and darkness: the world of insects. In raw, lyrical prose, García Freire portrays a world brought low by human greed, while hinting at glimmers of hope in the unlikeliest places.

• Language: English
• Publisher: World Editions
• Release date: May 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781642861174

Natalia García Freire

Natalia García Freire is a journalist and author from Cuenca, Ecuador. She has a Master's degree in Creative Writing from the Escuela de Escritores in Madrid, and alongside her writing she now teaches Creative Writing at the University of Azuay in Ecuador. This World Does Not Belong to Us was first published in Spanish in 2019. It is her debut novel.

Book preview

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A journey to the bowels of the earth

After years away, Lucas returns uninvited to the home he was expelled from as a child. The garden has been conquered by weeds, which blanket his mother’s beloved flowerbeds and his father’s grave alike. A lot has changed since Eloy and Felisberto were invited into the family home to work for Lucas’s father, long ago. The two hulking strangers have brought the land and everyone on it under their control—and removed nuisances like Lucas. Now everything rots. Lucas, a hardened young man, turns to a world that thrives in dirt and darkness: the world of insects. In raw, lyrical prose, García Freire portrays a world brought low by human greed, while hinting at glimmers of hope in the unlikeliest places.

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Praise for This World Does Not Belong to Us

One of the debut novels that most stood out this year in Latin America.

New York Times

García Freire manages to make us sweat with her characters. Feel the sting of their bites. This novel demonstrates a salient maturity, exudes literary knowledge, and takes risks. The writer masters the world of emotions and the words to encapsulate it.

El País

This book is pure beauty, pure love for the written word.

COPE Blogs

García Freire takes us to the deepest parts of the human condition.

Página Dos

Full of courage and lucidity, Natalia García Freire writes against the current; she doesn’t care about hype or dogmas. Her writing is inhabited by the voices of literary masters. What a mature novel from a twenty-nine-year-old who knows so much about life, the passing of time, old age, the absence of God and death. There are books that can only be written by those who love plants devastatingly. This is one of them.

El Universo

"This World Does Not Belong to Us leads the reader into the deepest, darkest regions of human existence, where what is most infected and rotten becomes beautiful and liberating."

Todo Literatura

Why do we need to read this book? Because like all good literature, as full of inventions as it may seem, it contains a core of truth about human nature. We need to read this book because we are all parents or children and at some point we have questioned or will question what it is to be a father, what it is to be a child. And above all because it tells us about a completely alien world that exists right next to us, or next to our feet—the world of insects.

Recordo

A maturity that leaves you breathless. This great writer forces us to lie down in the dirt and be touched by insects, plants, and matter.

Radio Nacional de España

Natalia García Freire is unbelievably young to have written a first work of such talent.

Relatos en construcción

"There’s an echo of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo in this novel. The return home, the search for a father or at least the memory of him. The ghosts. Only here, instead of the murmurs, we have a constant buzzing of insects and the noise of animals."

MARÍA JOSÉ NAVIA, author of SANT

I am moved by its tenderness, the shadow of its flight, the kingdom it comes from. Insect and poverty. Larva and death.

DARA SCULLY, author of Animal de nieve

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NATALIA GARCÍA FREIRE was born in Cuenca, Ecuador, in 1991. She teaches Creative Writing at Azuay University and has also worked as a primary school teacher. García Freire’s journalistic work has appeared in outlets such as BBC Mundo and Univisión, and her short story Noche de fiesta was published in the Spanish literary journal La gran belleza. This World Does Not Belong to Us is García Freire’s debut novel. It was nominated for the Tigre Juan literary award and selected by the New York Times as one of the best Spanish-language books of 2019. It has been translated into Italian, French, and Turkish.

VICTOR MEADOWCROFT is a translator from Spanish and Portuguese and a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s MA in Literary Translation program. His translations of works by María Fernanda Ampuero, Itamar Vieira Junior, and Murilo Rubião have appeared in the literary journals Latin American Literature Today and Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing. His cotranslation with Anne McLean of Stranger to the Moon by prizewinning Colombian author Evelio Rosero was recently published.

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AUTHOR

"This World Does Not Belong to Us began as an attempt to tell the story of my grandmother’s house. That was the house where I learned what death, madness, sickness, and love mean, the house where I lost people, where I couldn’t understand that they were not going to come back. So, I used fiction as a way to reach them; through words, through imagination, through insects and earth."

TRANSLATOR

What I enjoyed most about translating Natalia García Freire’s riveting debut was the challenge of capturing the urgent, enigmatic, and idiosyncratic voice of Lucas, the novel’s narrator. Lucas’s inability to reconcile his father’s sterile view of the world with what he witnesses in nature, where things are in a constant state of flux and decay, is the driving force behind his narration: a furious denunciation and repudiation of the hypocrisy and myopia of his father’s belief system.

PUBLISHER

Natalia García Freire is a new and highly exciting voice in Latin American literature. Her debut novel totally blew me away; it’s as powerful as a punch to the gut; it’s the sort of story to make you fall flat on the earth with the taste of soil in your mouth and the scent of decay in your nose. Hers is a dark universe, full of mystery and poetry. Hers is a story one reads with the senses rather than with the mind.

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NATALIA GARCÍA FREIRE

This World

Does Not

Belong to Us

Translated from the Spanish

by Victor Meadowcroft

WORLD EDITIONS

New York, London, Amsterdam

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Published in the USA in 2022 by World Editions LLC, New York

World Editions

New York / London / Amsterdam

Copyright © Natalia García Freire, 2019

English translation copyright © Victor Meadowcroft, 2022

Author portrait © María García Freire

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available

ISBN Trade paperback 978-1-64286-115-0

ISBN E-book 978-1-64286-117-4

First published as Nuestra piel muerta in Spain and Latin America in 2019 by La Navaja Suiza

UK edition published in 2022 by Oneworld Publications, London

This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s PEN Translates programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly cooperation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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www.worldeditions.org

Book Club Discussion Guides are available on our website.

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For Matías and Bartleby (our cat)

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"We listen to insects

and human voices

with different ears"

KOBAYASHI ISSA

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I don’t believe my dead father is watching me. But his body is buried in this garden, what is left of my mother’s garden, surrounded by slugs, camel spiders, earthworms, ants, beetles, and woodlice. Perhaps there’s even some scorpion that sits beside my father’s semi-decomposed face, together resembling the depictions in an Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb.

We buried him near this spot where I’m resting, behind these stone statues. If I scrabbled all night, I might come across him. Who knows whether I would first grab hold of his hands or his feet or the ends of his black suit pants? Who knows how his body may have repositioned itself in order to rest in peace? We buried him without so much as changing that old suit he was wearing, because the body was starting to smell.

Everything happened so quickly that it’s only now, after these many nights and days have passed, that I’m beginning to think of him as truly dead, dead enough to return and haunt a place. And at night I sometimes speak to him.

If you’re watching me right now, father: I’ve come home. Although it seems more like I’ve come back to some other place, some other time, some other world, in which we never existed. I’m sorry if I occasionally get distracted and focus, incessantly, on the things you called worthless. But right now, surrounded by all those earthworms, you must be thinking these things weren’t so unimportant after all, right? If they get in through your mouth and your ears and even, who knows, through your anus, and gnaw away at you through the night; if they traverse your body from top to bottom searching for anything left of you they can use, and then settle upon your hands and feet and wriggle. Don’t you think that, after our deaths, after everything, it is they

Reviews for This World Does Not Belong to Us

[anniemod · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A man comes back to his childhood home and confronts his own demons while talking to his dead father. That's probably the easiest way to explain what this novella (or short novel if you prefer) is all about and despite being absolutely correct, it is not adequate. So let's try a different way. Years ago Lucas was sold in slavery. But no, this is not where the story really starts. Once upon a time Lucas was the only son of a wealthy father, growing up in a big house with 3 nursemaids and a mother who loved gardening and nature. Except that not everything was as it seemed and both the mother and the father appeared to somewhat volatile - and one day the mother was carted to the loony bin and the father, who was probably the crazier of the two - if not the only crazy one, managed to lose everything, including his own life. But before that happened, 2 strangers somehow convinced the father to move in with the family - and proceeded to wreck the previously happy family. The novella is written as a monologue - Lucas talking to his dead father - and that makes all these early memories somewhat suspect - we are hearing the voice of a man who went through a lot of hardship, talking about his boyhood memories. So was everything as awful as described? Maybe. But it does not matter - it is the past Lucas remembers - and in his head, for his decisions, it is the only past that matters. The text switches between the past and the present in almost alternating chapters (especially later in the novella, the switching breaks up a bit) and it takes awhile to put all the elements in their correct order - the death of the father which at the start appears to be the catalyst for the return and all that follows ends up being very different from what one assumes after the first chapters. But the novella is not only about cruelty and humans being humans. Lucas inherited the love for everything living so his life is full of insects and plant life and the author spends a lot of time on these elements (if you are afraid of creepy crawlies, you probably should not read this). The edition I read (the one published in USA by World Editions) has multiple insects drawn on the covers and inside of the text as well, adding to all the creepiness. Add Lucas's obsession with decay (some of it probably clouding and changing his memories as well) and it can be an upsetting read. Neither the time, nor the place is explicitly mentioned in the text. There are enough clues to set the story in Latin America though and someone better acquainted with the local differences may even see some clues pointing to the author's native Ecuador (which I assume is the setting). Based on the actions of different people and the lack of certain elements, I'd assume it is set somewhere at the start of the 20th century and I suspect I am not far off.Despite all that wild life and nature, it is a story about humanity and of belonging. I am not sure it really succeeded in that - even our narrator remains incomplete. But on the other hand, as it is essentially a letter (unwritten but still a letter) to a dead man, the style and the missing parts make sense. I will not call it an enjoyable read but it was a decent one anyway and if the writer writes another book (that was her debut) and it is translated, I will probably pick it up.