Friends

From prize–winning author Aurora Venturini, a masterful and acerbic novel about a successful artist in her 80s returning to her hometown in Argentina after decades living and working in Europe, reckoning with old and new friends, lovers, and ideas

In a breathless, incantatory voice, Friends tells the story of Yuna Riglos, a celebrated Argentine painter nearing the end of her life. From her apartment in La Plata, Yuna writes as she paints: obsessively, associatively, driven by memory rather than chronology. Fame has not delivered peace. Instead, it has sharpened her awareness of what art cannot redeem.

At the center of the book is Antonella, a teenage girl from the slums who enters Yuna’s life as a housekeeper and becomes something far more unsettling: muse, double, survivor, and moral reckoning. As Yuna shelters Antonella from an unspeakable past of hunger, violence, and incest, the novel probes the uneasy ethics of care, authorship, and representation. What does it mean to protect another person—and what does it mean to turn their suffering into art?

Threaded through the narrative are spectral presences from Argentine and European culture—Pizarnik, Lautréamont, Dante, Goya—figures of genius and despair who haunt Yuna’s imagination as both warning and justification. Friendship, especially between women, emerges as both refuge and trap, most painfully embodied in the fate of Yuna’s fellow artist Matilde du Pin.

By turns savage, tender, comic, and horrifying, this is a novel about beauty and monstrosity, class and cruelty, the body as archive, and the terrible persistence of memory. Friends asks whether art can offer salvation—or whether it merely gives shape to what cannot be forgiven or undone. | "There is no choice but to surrender to the wicked charm of Yuna Riglos, the dazzling old lady of Friends. Aurora Venturini writes about a future which is progressively more tempting, where language, friendship, and love of cities become important matters. If you ask me what kind of old lady I want to be, I will say, one who looks like Yuna Riglos." —Camila Sosa Villada, author of The Queens Of Sarmiento Park | AURORA VENTURINI was born in 1922 in La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina. She wrote more than forty 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-two.

KIT MAUDE is a literary translator based in Buenos Aires. He has translated dozens of writers from Spain and Latin America for a wide variety of publishers, publications, and institutions.