Aurora Venturini
Aurora Venturini was born in 1921 in La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina. She worked as a psychologist and Rorschach test specialist at the Institute of the Child’s Psychology and Re-education, where she befriended Eva Perón. In 1948, Jorge Luis Borges awarded her the Premio Iniciación for her book El Solitario. Persecuted for her political ideas, she had to go into exile in Paris, where she interacted with personalities of French existentialism and Violette Leduc in particular. She wrote more than thirty books. In 2007, she received the Página/12 New Novel Award for Cousins. She died in 2015, in Buenos Aires, at the age of ninety-four.
This month sees the publication of a new Aurora Venturini novel, and I'm hoping a widespread bloom of this Argentinian novelist's work sweeps through English-language bookshops. As in the much-lauded 2023 novel, Cousins, the narrator of We, the Casertas is a young woman whose intellectual gifts offer some hope of transcending her monstrous home life. Translator Kit Maude has succeeded again in delivering a darkly brilliant, compellingly wry voice—which is essential, as each novel is a wondrous exploration of the narrator's mind.