It’s not uncommon for an author to be discovered late in life, but there can’t have been many who were recognized as late as Aurora Venturini. An Argentinian writer, Venturini became prominent in 2007 upon winning the inaugural New Novel Award sponsored by the Buenos Aires–based newspaper Página/12. Her winning title, Las primas, is an outré tale of cousins, “freaks” and “useless things,” who are abused and exact a measure of revenge, all in extreme fashion, while one of them carves out a career as a painter. At the time, Venturini had written dozens of other books that either sat in drawers or only found publication with obscure presses, so it’s understandable perhaps that her initial reaction upon winning was simultaneously defensive and grateful: “Al fin un jurado honesto,” finally an honest jury. She was eighty-five years old.

Las primas was quickly hailed as a masterpiece, and eventually found audiences outside of Argentina as well, including in the United States, where Kit Maude’s English translation, titled Cousins, was published to critical acclaim in 2023. Adding to the interest in the novel was the story of the author herself, sparked by Venturini’s widely repeated declaration that Las primas, in all its debauched and often offensive glory, was autobiographical. Her claim is probably not entirely accurate, according to Venturini’s biographer Liliana Viola, who is also the executor of her literary estate. What is clear, however, is that Venturini constructed her character off the page as carefully as she did those in her novels, developing and encouraging myths, exaggerations, hyperbole, and seemingly delirious assertions, many of which are closer to the truth than people would think.

This mythomania is blazingly on display in Nosotros, los Caserta, the first of Venturini’s older novels that Viola decided to publish, or republish as the case may be, as a version of the novel originated as far back as 1969, when it seemingly won two awards in Italy. Two editions, with subtle differences, were subsequently published in Argentina. And, in the wake of the popularity of Las primas, the novel was published yet again in 2011, by one of Argentina’s prominent publishers. Finally all these iterations were reconciled by a scholar who, working with Viola, produced the definitive version of the novel, which was published in Spanish in 2021 and included an introduction chronicling its history. That final version, sans intro, is now available in an English translation from Maude titled We, the Casertas.

The narrative of the resurrected novel follows María Micaela Stradolini, who goes by Chela, from her childhood in the provincial capital La Plata, south of Buenos Aires, in the 1920s, through her travels to Chile, France, and Italy in the 1940s and ’50s. Chela is astonishingly precocious, entering sixth grade—with the help of a forged birth certificate—when she is just eight years old, and winning publication of her first novel in a contest at age twelve. She is also almost completely lacking in social graces, reveling in bodily fluids and filth, and spending every free moment tramping through the family estate and exploring the nearby ruins of her Italian ancestors’ century-old home. In her own words, she’s “an extraordinarily gifted animal cast by mistake into a world of common people. I am a zoomorphic deity. My father says that I’m a beast, and he’s right.” Confined to the attic whenever she is sick, the girl moves up there full-time before her fifth birthday, surrounding herself with an ever-changing menagerie that is anchored by Bertoldo, an owlet she rescues, declaring, “There must be a universe for the despairing and abandoned. For the attic creatures.”

The novel starts and finishes in this same attic, and even when Chela leaves home to travel, she remains an attic creature. Physically separated from where “normal people” live their lives, attics initially offer both a “refuge” from those she wishes to avoid and a space where she has free rein to continually better herself intellectually. The one time in the novel when, on holiday in Madrid, she briefly embraces the “enchanting tyrant” of “idleness” is described as a “vacation from the attic.” Eventually the attic space becomes synonymous with her self-imposed exile, but she doesn’t always isolate herself within these sancta, repeatedly allowing the people—and animals—she cares about the most (with one exception) to share the spaces with her, first in La Plata and later in France and Italy.

Chela’s mother, who gave up a career as a concert pianist to rush into marriage, views her firstborn as an untamable “little freak,” and focuses on her other children. Lula, two years younger, is lovely and docile, but constantly harassed by her big sister. Juan Sebastián, born when Chela is five, is “an imbecilic dwarf,” the result of birth defects possibly caused by a case of rubella that Chela had when her mother was pregnant with the boy. Guilt and apathy keep her from meeting her brother until he is five years old, but she then grows to feel very protective of him. Chela’s father doesn’t play much of a parenting role in any of the children’s lives, meaning Chela is largely wrangled by a series of attendants, including Sara, the family’s maid and nanny; María Assuri, a “psychologist” Chela later disparages as merely a “half-educated teacher”; and Father Ariel, the confessor from the religious institute where Chela enrolls for secondary schooling at the age of nine.

We, the Casertas is structurally front-loaded, with the opening three chapters that recount Chela’s childhood and adolescence constituting forty percent of the book’s length. Once she turns seventeen, the pace accelerates. with the remainder of the book comprising twenty-three often bite-sized chapters relating more discrete events, starting with the successive deaths over four years of Chela’s father, brother, and mother. During this period, she also has a passionate affair with a married man named Luis. He is the first, and she claims, “only human I ever loved,” though she immediately qualifies that assertion by adding “as part of a normal relationship at least.” Adultery is not really “normal,” but Chela is possibly using the word as a substitute for “heterosexual.” She later has other meaningful relationships, with men and possibly women, but her only other great love is an incestuous, all-consuming relationship with her great-aunt.

When Luis refuses to leave his wife, Chela leaves Argentina, accompanied only by Bertha, her late brother’s pet turtle that she wears on a chain around her neck or carries in her pocket. Though she returns to La Plata occasionally, Chela spends the majority of the rest of the novel abroad, starting with three years in Chile “living in the attic of a giant,” namely Pablo Neruda, on Isla Negra. After World War II, she is off to Europe, starting with Paris, where she lives la vie bohème as if Baudelaire was staging it, falling in with three incestuous siblings who belong to a spiritualist sect with whom she explores “the aromas of lofts and garrets.” Through the sect, she meets another sibling duo, and has a relationship with the unmarried brother that “could have been perfect, but humanity doesn’t lend itself to perfection, and some misfortune was bound to crush us sooner or later.” Finally in January 1953, Chela goes to Sicily to track down her father’s sole surviving ancestor, Angelina Stradolini de Caserta, who like Juan Sebastián—and one of the characters in Cousins—is a dwarf. She and her great-aunt begin a “forbidden” physical relationship, often while under the influence of an elixir from “a wizard.”

Cousins attracted raves for Venturini’s prose, particularly several passages that forgo punctuation, and while We, the Casertas is stylistically more conventional, it is still an ingenious and engrossing read, starting with some lovely imagery that Maude brings out with poetic beauty, sentences such as “When she frowned, wrinkles sank rails across her plains, rails along which ran the train of worry.” Or “Dew ran down the windows of the greenhouses, as though the glass were crying.” The novel’s flashiest moment comes when Chela asks Neruda a question about where he is from, prompting a two-page answer chockablock with the poet’s go-to imagery: butterflies and sunflowers, honeysuckle and eucalyptus.

The real flair of We, the Casertas comes from continual references to celebrated art and artists, including Shakespeare and Proust; Orpheus and the Moirai; Dürer and Velázquez. But none is cited more often than Chela’s beloved Arthur Rimbaud, the scatological enfant terrible of nineteenth-century French poetry, whom she sees as a kindred spirit. (Venturini seemingly adores him too, given that she quotes him in a 2008 interview, when talking about her career.)

The novel’s quotes from Rimbaud offer several insights, starting with the way translation can function almost like a game of telephone, as the original French verse, or more accurately Venturini’s version of it, has been translated into Spanish by her and then into English by Maude. One example, using the subject of a sentence from the Illuminations poem “Les ponts,” shows how subtle differences can emerge from this process. The line in Maude’s English version reads: “Lightning from heaven brought the comedy to an end.” Venturini’s Spanish version is “Un rayo desde el cielo aniquiló la comedia.” “Lightning from heaven” makes perfect sense as an interpretation of “un rayo desde el cielo.” But looking at Rimbaud’s original phrasing reveals a slightly different intention. He wrote “Un rayon blanc, tombant du haut du ciel,” which in English translation, from either Wallace Fowlie or John Ashbery, becomes “A white ray, falling from the top of the sky.” Venturini’s omission of white from her Spanish version allows Rimbaud’s ray of light, connoting a hopeful sign from the heavens, to become lightning, which is usually more threatening.

It’s impossible to know if Venturini’s tweaks were intentional or not, but a possible clue can be found from Chela, who, at one point in the story, recites “some verses from [Les Chants de] Maldoror that I knew by heart mixed with some of my own invention.” That statement could describe Venturini’s approach to Rimbaud. Viola, her biographer, also points out that Venturini was writing at a time when, as she puts it, no one was persecuted by social networks, no one was going to contradict her.

Regardless of intent, one passage in particular demonstrates Venturini’s intimate understanding of Rimbaud’s work. When Chela’s parents go to Europe in 1934, she and Juan Sebastián, who are left in the care of Sara, quickly descend from the attic to take “possession” of the “people house,” terrorizing the maid and trashing the home. It’s a crucial moment in Chela’s life, where she subsequently recognizes her worth as an artist and a young woman, and introducing this passage, she quotes four lines of a Rimbaud poem that she says “helped me to put together the puzzle of our lives.” The poem is “Le cœur volé”—The Stolen Heart—a ribald poem first included in a notorious May 1871 letter the then sixteen-year-old Rimbaud wrote, in which he declared that he was “degrading [himself] as much as possible” in order to be a poet. Chela’s abasement is not, at this point in her life, sexually oriented like much of Rimbaud’s, but it is still an apposite piece for Venturini to include at such a formative moment for Chela.

Near the end of the novel, Chela reverts to that depraved, indolent youth, walking around half-dressed in “urine-soaked nightshirts” in La Plata and, while back in Paris for a time, becoming once again “the filthy creature no one looked at twice.“ Chela is a misanthrope, but she doesn’t spare herself from criticism either, as during a brief stop in Rome when she is thirty years old and wonders “how my life would be if I weren’t quite so fanciful, what might have become of me if I had been so crammed with objectivity that there was no room left for the imagination.”

It’s a bleak sentiment to come from the pen of such an endlessly imaginative author, and given the autobiographical elements of Chela, it is hard not to feel Venturini crying out a bit in frustration. It reminds me of a moment from the first interview Venturini gave to Página/12 after winning the award that changed the course of her life. The interviewer, who is in fact Viola serving in her role as organizer of the prize jury, asks Venturini why all her books were only published by small presses, instead of major publishers. Venturini answers, “Porque no me gusta pedir. Y mucho menos, que me digan que no”—Because I don’t like to ask. And even more, because I don’t like to be told no. She quickly recovers, to talk about fear of computers (she never used one), belief in God (it makes everything easier), and her parents (she wasn’t around when either of them died), but it is a shocking moment of vulnerability. No one is going to say no to Venturini at this point, and while I wish she had been discovered when she was young enough to see the reception of her old books, as a reader, I’m just glad to know that there are still many more stories to come.

We, the Casertas by Aurora Venturini, translated from Spanish by Kit Maude (Soft Skull, May 2025)

Copyright © 2025 by Cory Oldweiler. All rights reserved.