Fish soup

Consisting of two novellas and seven stories, García Robayo's collection, her first to be translated into English, is a gorgeous, blackly humorous look into the lives of Colombians struggling to find their place in society, both at home and abroad. In the title story, a widower barkeep hallucinates images of his late wife sleeping with local sailors, while "Better Than Me" places a professor in Italy as he tries to reconcile with his reluctant adult daughter. Narrated by a nameless female character, the novella "Waiting for a Hurricane" is a study in longing, following the protagonist from preteen to early adulthood while she pursues, with increasing desperation, an escape from her seaside hometown. "Sexual Education," the other novella, is a sharp examination of Catholic school guilt in which a teen studies abstinence in high school and is consistently tempted by sex. Every tale is provocative, and García Robayo writes with an authority that is sure to resonate. Her style weaves conversational frankness with emotional depth, and the resulting stories are hard to shake. (Dec.)

In her first book to be published in English, Colombian author Garca Robayo plunks readers into nine seemingly mundane lives.In the opening novella, Waiting for a Hurricane, a young woman aches to escape the world she has been born into: a coastal Colombian city where the lagoon, "because it was full of crap," overflows when it rains and a "common as muck" family that refuses to face reality. Since the age of 7, the narrator has seen herself as different from the "lost causes" around her and so she makes bold personal and professional choices in order to forge her own path in the world. As the book moves into its second section, a collection of short stories published in Spanish as Worse Things, it continues to follow individuals eager to escape the frustrations of life. In "You Are Here," for instance, a salesman winds up in the "biggest hotel in Europe" after an accident at the Madrid airport results in all planes being grounded. All the man wants to do is wash up, have a smoke, and fly home to his wife, but the insistent hotel staff blocks even his small attempts to find comfort. In another story, "Worse Things," an adolescent named Titi finds ways to slowly withdraw into himself as his family monitors the space he takes up in the world. At first glance, the two novellas and seven short stories of this collection might appear to be quiet slices of everyday life. Garca Robayo's thoughtful prose, however, which expertly combines playful wit with careful restraint, infuses each story with a powerful undercurrent of desire that can turn ordinary events like skipping school, chatting with neighbors, or stomaching an unexpected layover into surreal, often unnerving, encounters. While this emphasis on yearning appears most explicitly in the second novella, Sexual Educationan often humorous, refreshingly frank depiction of the expectations of chastity, pulls of desire, and atmosphere of confusion that encircle the lives of teenage girlsthe unspoken longings and unanswered questions of the other tales similarly leave readers eager for more work from Garca Robayo.An evocative collection that conveys the potency of desire in even the most ordinary lives. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Living by the sea is both good and bad for exactly the same reason: the world ends at the horizon. That is, the world never ends. And you always expect too much. At first, you hope everything you're waiting for will arrive one day on a boat; then you realise nothing's going to arrive and you'll have to go looking for it instead. I hated my city because it was both really beautiful and really ugly, and I was somewhere in the middle. The middle was the worst place to be: hardly anyone made it out of the middle. It was where the lost causes lived: there, nobody was poor enough to resign themselves to being poor forever, so they spent their lives trying to move up in the world and liberate themselves. When all attempts failed - as they usually did - their self-awareness disappeared and that's when all was lost. My family, for example, had no self-awareness whatsoever. They'd found ways of fleeing reality, of seeing things from a long way off, looking down on it all from their castle in the sky. And most of the time, it worked. My father was a pretty useless man. He spent his days trying to resolve trivial matters that he thought were of the utmost importance in order for the world to keep on turning. Things like getting the most out of the pair of taxis we owned and making sure the drivers weren't stealing from him. But they were always stealing from him. His friend Felix, who drove a van for a chemist, always came griping to him: I saw that waste-of-space who drives your taxi out and about... Where? On Santander Avenue, burning rubber with some little whore. My dad fired and hired drivers every day as a matter of course and this helped him, 1) to feel powerful, and 2) not to think about anything else. My mother also kept herself occupied, but with other things: every day she was involved in some family bust-up. Every day, that was her formula. As soon as my mother got out of bed she would pick up the phone, call my aunt, or my uncle, or my other aunt, and she shouted and cried and wished them dead; them and their damned mother, who was also her mother, my grandmother. Sometimes she also called my grandmother, and shouted and cried and wished her dead too, her and her damned offspring. My mother loved saying the word "damned", she found it cathartic and liberating; although she would never have expressed it that way because she had a limited vocabulary. The third call of the day was to Don Hector, who she always sucked up to because he let her buy things on tick: Good morning, Don Hector, how are you? Could you send me a loaf of bread and half a dozen eggs? Her face awash with tears. Her formula was the same as my father's: making sure that there were no lulls, no dead time that might cause them to look around and realise where they were: in a tiny apartment in a second-rate neighbourhood, with a sewer pipe and various bus routes running through it. I was not like them, I very quickly realised where I was, and at the age of seven I already knew that I would leave. I didn't know when, or where I would go. When people asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? I'd reply: a foreigner. My brother also knew that he wanted to get out of there, and he made the decisions he needed to achieve this: he quit high school to devote all his time to working out at the gym and making out with gringas he met on the beach. Because, for him, leaving meant someone taking him away. He wanted to live either in Miami or New York, he was undecided. He studied English because it would be useful in either city. Less so in Miami, that's what his friend Rafa told him. Rafa had been out of the country once, when he was very young. I liked Rafa because he had got out, and that was something to be admired. But then I met Gustavo, who had not left but arrived, and not from one country, but several. Excerpted from It Could Be Worse by Margarita García Robayo, Charlotte Coombe All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.