Plaza Requiem. Stories at the Edge of Ordinary Lives

“These stories of women trapped by family relationships, often in the most complex and alienated ways possible—as an exile returning to the scene of a massacre perpetrated by her father, a mother forever looking for her dead son in the desert along the US border with Mexico, or a young wife held hostage by a violent husband who plays Russian roulette in bed—show their protagonists’ power and decisiveness as they free themselves from threatening, excruciating realities. These are women who fight back against repression, dominance and cruelty, even in the strangest and most marginalized destinies, which sometimes bring to mind the ironic barbs of fate in Luciano Visconti’s film Senso. Martha Bátiz is a masterful author in both English and Spanish, with an inspired eye for the original, from Jewish girls pretending to lie on the beach in their apartment in the Warsaw ghetto to a rural mother of seven daughters who simultaneously share the same emotions. There is always something new, surprising and powerful in her writing.” Hugh Hazelton