On September 13, 1987, in the city of Goiânia, Brazil, not far from the country’s capital, a small capsule of highly radioactive material was stolen from an abandoned hospital. Although the site, the Instituto Goiano de Radioterapia, required high security, its former owners had neglected the place and squatters and looters had frequented it, intermittently, over the years. That day, the guard tasked with protecting the radioactive remains did not show up to work, and scrap merchants Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira took a radioactive capsule with them. Once at home, they removed its protection, tried to open it, and broke one of the layers that covered it. They felt nauseous, but blamed their food. They ended up selling it to another scrap merchant, who deemed the glowing capsule charming and thought it would make a lovely ring for his wife. When she refused it, the pill kept being passed around from hand to hand, progressively broken down and admired as a magical artifact. This resulted in the worst radioactive accident in South American history, placed only two levels under the seriousness of Chernobyl.
The events that led to the Goiânia accident belong to a deeply Latin American story, where beauty clashes with state negligence and tragedy with chance. Liliana Colanzi, the Bolivian author of You Glow in the Dark (published in February 2024), retells it through several formally complex devices in the title story. Historical details are intertwined with the language of science fiction and magical realism, giving texture to the incidents through a kaleidoscopic piece where each character involved in the disaster is treated with sensitivity and grace. The reader sees the catastrophe through the eyes of children (one of whom describes the capsule as “finer than sand and made of fire”); a government agent working on the case and their official documents; the scrap collector who, dazzled by the light the radioactive piece gives off, attempts to make the “shimmering, unusual ring” for his wife; the family members who, enamored with the strange object, try to open it as if a genie would emerge from it; and the only exception, a woman named Gabriela, who, “Like a dog that sniffs a storm on the air, like a bird that hears a shot on the far side of the forest… was picking up the danger signals.” The result is a beautiful, experimental reconstruction of the events, where the archival history of the nuclear tragedy and scientific developments are contrasted with a local cosmology that grapples with the capsule as magic.
The rest of the stories in You Glow in the Dark are written with a similar courage for mixing literary genres and voices. Colanzi’s prose skillfully intersects science fiction with the new weird and with the indigenous cosmologies of the region. The short stories are often experimental and polyphonic, full of eloquent references that range from Sebaldian images (they seem to be internet-generated, often pixelated) to visual poetry to more obscure cultural references. A Latin American reader might perhaps pick up the influence of the postapocalyptic cult classic Plop by Rafael Pinedo (whose novel appears to be extracted from pre-history, much like the first short story in this collection, “The Cave”) or Sara Gallardo’s Eisejuaz (a book that Colanzi herself has published in her imprint Dum Dum, in which Gallardo manages to evoke an indigenous voice through her prose in a fascinating, seamless way).
In “The Cave,” Colanzi takes an almost posthumanist approach and, instead of focusing her narrative on an event or a set of figures, creates a cave as her main character. Mixing indigenous traditions from across Latin America, it begins with a woman, who seems to come from pre-conquest Mexico (there are references to Oaxaca and Zapoteco) giving birth to twins. “Something terrible had just happened to her, something the old women discussed in whispers around the fire: she had given birth to double children.” In an action that could be rooted in Guaraní beliefs, she immediately slaughters them, and perhaps curses the cave with the cadavers of her own children. Subsequently, the inhabitants of the cave overlap with each other, each more doomed than the next, while the main thread of the narration seems to be the passage of time. The cave holds within it the trajectories of star-crossed lovers, the history of bat excrement and the discovery of its scientific novelty, and even a nonbinary time traveler named Onyx Müller who fails at his attempt to visit Woodstock in 1969. Here, Colanzi utilizes the politically charged “lenguaje inclusivo” in Spanish, a feminist usage of the letter “e” in the usually masculine generic plural and a gender-neutral pronoun which Chris Andrews translates as “they.” Characters are not exclusively human, and this creates a rich and textured story that could have been a novel on its own. The story is quickly paced, which makes for an intense reading experience, as timelines merge into each other beautifully.
The stories of You Glow in the Dark take place in a pan-Latin American landscape that ranges from Mexico and Brazil to Colanzi’s native Bolivia. One of its many qualities lies also in the fact that, while working with a genre such as science fiction, which feels dominated by an American sensibility, Colanzi successfully creates a language and landscape that feel native to the region. Chris Andrews, a veteran translator who has worked with the likes of Roberto Bolaño and César Aira, successfully conveys a language that is, at the same time, vivid and surreal, poetic, local, and infused with technicalities. Strange, evocative, and somewhat ominous sentences emerge from this juxtaposition; Colanzi speaks about nuclear disasters as producing an “opalescent mist of spores,” describes a plain that was “covered with iridescent mushrooms puffing little clouds of spores up into the air,” or, in one of the longer stories, “Atomito,” creates a character whose “migraine [that had been] building since her mother died blows out like a mushroom cloud, unleashing a psychic storm.”
When it comes to aesthetics, You Glow in the Dark manages to mix local customs and traditions with elements of kitsch that sprang up when modernity and the internet arrived in Latin America. In no story is this clearer than in “Atomito,” about a young group of friends living in a highly surveilled part of a town that lies next to a nuclear plant. Here, Aymara-language slang and expressions overlap with memorable bits of camp, which range from the strange attachment to anime in the region—gesturing toward a youth subculture called otaku—to the screaming voices of evangelical pastors in the background and the occasional appearance of a chicken shop called “Pollos Bin Laden” (this might sound like an exaggerated joke, but it is not: there is a Lebanese food shop called “Bin Laden” in Panama City, and a guitar shop in the center of Mexico City called “Holocausto”). This is combined with visual cues, some taken from 2008 internet culture (for instance, a gamer-style sign that reads “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: YONI HAS UNLOCKED THE NEXT STAGE”) and some that are common on the streets of Latin America (such as a handwritten, scratchy notice that reads “ELECTRICAL APPLIANCES REPAIRED”).
It is within this world that we meet the charming Kurmi Pérez, whose mother has died unexpectedly and who houses her friends during a heavily regulated curfew. Following her mother’s death, Kurmi contracts a constant splitting headache and spends her days knitting. She befriends Orki, a former DJ, and Yoni, who works for Pollos Bin Laden as a delivery man. There is also Percéfone, a young woman whose brother was hit by a stray bullet in the protests against the nuclear plant. The generation in “Atomito” exists in this alternative space, where the dystopian overlaps with the plain ugly and the traces of an indigenous past, and it is within that chaos that they attempt to exist, to eat, to drink, and to party. Not unlike in our present, they are driven to hedonism and cynicism intermittently, being forced to reckon with horror on a daily basis.
The story progresses from chronicles of bleakness, partying, and anguish until, one morning, Orki disappears. His friends look for him, worried, and hear news about ecoterrorists trying to strike the nuclear plant. Finally, videos of Orki appear to have gone viral online, where he resembles a drunk man wandering through the alleys of a market, dancing nonstop. People seem to laugh at this gesture (“‘He’s drunk,’ says a chola. ‘Hey, where’s the party,’ yells another, and tosses him a corn cob”) but soon he has followers who join his joyful procession, reminiscent of the dancing plague of 1518 in Strasbourg. Orki’s friends think he’s bewitched and try to track him down, but Orki is dancing with an old flame of his, “the desire passing between them creat[ing] a magnetic field strong enough to revive the hidden, buried city.” With echoes of a scene in Daniel Saldaña París’s El baile y el incendio (translation forthcoming), the lost Bolivian youth of this story find a revelation, if not a form of rebellion, in the act of partying.
The rest of the short stories of You Glow in the Dark possess, as well, this formally powerful combination of genres and cosmologies, while holding a tender sensitivity at their core, often relayed through the eyes of girls and young women. In “The Debt,” a young woman accompanies her aunt to repay a debt in the Amazon, and both the landscape and family secrets unravel throughout the narration. In “The Greenest Eyes,” a girl who turns ten longs for green eyes (like her father’s, who descends from an Italian family) and ends up in a tattoo parlor where a man known as “The Boss” promises to grant girls wishes in exchange for money. In “The Narrow Way,” which was recently published in The New Yorker, two sisters try to negotiate the strictly religious community they belong to and their own curiosity about a broader life.
You Glow in the Dark is a book that manages to be sophisticated in its politics, savvy in its experimentation with genre, and inherently Latin American in its landscape and voice. It is a masterfully written, singular collection, reflecting an originality and formal exploration that one doesn’t encounter very often.
Copyright © 2024 by Julia Kornberg. All rights reserved.
