Out of the Cage

Out of the Cage opens in 1956, in Argentina, with the freakish death of Aurora Berro, and descends into a dark philosophical exploration of humanity and mortality. In the midst of her family's celebration of a national holiday, an LP, careening through the air like a "demented boomerang," severs her jugular. Her family- an agglomeration of perversions, deformities, and obsessions-seems at first not to notice, singing on. Aurora is left behind in a voyeuristic limbo as an omniscient first-person narrator, to observe the depravity of her family and reflect on the farce of her life and human existence.
Fernanda García Lao has been called "the strangest writer of Argentine literature," and in Out of the Cage, she lives up to that distinction. The book is saturated in strangeness, a blend of formal experimentation, eroticism, grotesque theatricality, and dark humor that evokes the absurdist fictions of Witold Gombrowicz and the style of Silvina Ocampo. The result is a macabre and fantastic vaudeville, a tragicomedy, a kind of Dadaist opus against ideas of eternal beauty and fixed identity, against absolute concepts and universality.

Fernanda García Lao is an Argentine novelist, poet, and playwright, referred to as "the strangest writer of Argentine literature." She was born in Mendoza, Argentina in 1966 to two left wing journalists, who in 1975 were forced to flee to Spain where they lived in exile for nearly twenty years. Fernanda received her education in Spain, studying acting, dance, music, and journalism. When she returned to Argentina in the early nineties, she was trained further as an actress, playwright, and director. She is the author of several novels, plays, and one collection of short stories. Her novels and stories have received wide acclaim and accolades, and have been translated into French, Portuguese, and Swiss. At the 2011 Guadalajara Book Fair, Garcia Lao was named one of the "25 Best Kept Secrets of Latin American Literature." This is her first book in English. Will Vanderhyden is a freelance translator, with an MA in Literary Translation from the University of Rochester. He has translated the work of Carlos Labbé, Rodrigo Fresán, and Fernanda García Lao, among others. His translations have appeared in journals such as Two Lines, The Literary Review, The Scofield, and The Arkansas International. He has received fellowships from the NEA and the Lannan Foundation. His translation of The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán won the 2018 Best Translated Book Award.