Paula Vázquez

“A genre-breaking book that incorporates narrative, poems, essays and an intense tale of farewell. Do we let go of people we love so they can leave? Do we write them? Writing can be a way of saying sorry, a way of finding reconciliation. A mother and daughter who are all mothers and all daughters that ever were: the mother of invention

There are works in which writing acts to encrypt closeness or absence: letters like a grave that traces the silhouettes of loved ones. Paula Vázquez realizes an exercise in remoteness and proximity, while lifting the veil from disappearance and agony. Those bodies we once had by our side now return, in this summons that is also a farewell. The Stars, her first novel, is written with meticulous rhythm and a great desire to find light. This book is like a catalyst of painful and sensitive particles, where love and literature meet up once more.” Francisco Garamond

“Mourning tends to outlive its telling: Letter to My Mother by Georges Simenon, A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir and A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke are novellas, as if narratives of maternal death demanded an ascetic synthesis in style, a kind of laconic sorrow. The Stars deserves to be a part of that melancholy group.” María Moreno

“This story belongs to the hallowed ‘literature of the self’ but is much more than that: it is fine poetry, it is intelligent, and spare, the discovery of how far the ability to love is tied to the ability to write. It is sober in tone, is so bereft of stridency – reminding me of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking – and has the opposite effect: it annihilates.’’ Josefina Licitra

“The Argentinian writer opens up a new path, that is imaginative but severe, tender and chiaroscuro, in the genre of filial mourning. The Stars achieves something much closer to a casual photo, taken without warning, than a solemn monument. The book’s aspiration is slight, in its own way, and hence its final success, is so remarkable.” Juan Marqués, El Mundo

“This is no self-help book, not a ‘new age’ philosophy, no lyrical explosion but soothing pages that dive into one’s consciousness and meaning of life through reflection. And every now and then, a sentence like a bullet…” Olga Merino, El Periódico

“The Stars is most of all a work about the power of words and a travel guide through intimate spaces across half the world, maybe because, as the author points out there is only one letter difference between ‘flight’ and ‘plight'.” Elena Costa, El cultural

“A beautiful story about pain, maternity, anguish and time. Through the illness and death of her mother, she speaks of filling voids, occupying emptiness, healing wounds and tearing down stereotypes. Hard to believe this is her first novel.” Loreto Sánchez Seoane