Reality is so monstrous that sometimes it's not even worth the effort to take it seriously. To explain it, we have to imagine grotesque figures; we have to backlight it among undecipherable scrawls in the hopes of finding some coherence in their outline. This novel by Fernando Contreras, originally published in Spanish under the title Los Peor in 1995, employs multiple ways of looking, ranging from humor to revulsion, like someone trying to decipher the invisible amid the noise. Eyes multiply in the effort to distinguish something in the jumble of half-done, half-undone buildings, vestiges of another Costa Rica that today is immersed in a new displacement: of dimensions, of sensibilities, of times.

This edition is the first English-language publication of the novel. Thanks to this translation by Milena Sanabria, anglophone readers will be able to step into a Costa Rica that deconstructs and reinvents itself, and to discover a literary universe that, though deeply local, resounds with universal concerns.

Fernando Chaves Espinach