Cousins

Name: Cousins
Brand: Tantor Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Aurora Venturini
ISBN: 9798350841466

Author: Aurora Venturini, Mariana Enriquez, Kit Maude

Narrator: Sol Madariaga

Unabridged: 4 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/25/2023

Categories: Fiction, Family Life, Psychological

Synopsis

At the age of eighty-five, Aurora Venturini stunned Argentine readers when her darkly funny and formally daring novel, Cousins (Las primas), won Página/12's New Novel Award. She had already written more than forty books, but it was only then, in 2007, that she was widely recognized as a paradigm-shifting voice in Spanish-language literature.

Cousins, widely regarded as Venturini's masterpiece, is the story of four women from an impoverished, dysfunctional family in La Plata, Argentina, who are forced to suffer through a series of ordeals, including illegal abortions, miscarriages, sexual abuse, disfigurement, and murder, narrated by a daughter whose success as a painter offers her a chance to achieve economic independence.

Neighborhood mythologies, family, female sexuality, vengeance, and social mobility through art are explored and scrutinized in the unmistakable voice of Yuna—a voice whose unconventional style can be candid, brutal, sharp, and utterly breathtaking. With the translation of Cousins into several languages for the first time, Aurora Venturini is now being discovered internationally and championed as a major voice in Latin American literature.

Contains mature themes.

About 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 Peron. In 1948, Jorge Luis Borges awarded her the Premio Iniciacion 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 Pagina/12 New Novel Award for Cousins. She died in 2015, in Buenos Aires, at the age of ninety-four.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Dale on February 05, 2017

Years ago I read and enjoyed several books by this author, so I was excited to get hold of this one. The book starts narrated by Hetta Tye. Her brother Will, has been in a serious climbing accident. This event brings back echoes from the family’s past and the reader learns more of family relationshi......more

Goodreads review by Nigel on October 26, 2016

In short - Parts of this book I really enjoyed. On the other hand... Maybe 3.5/5 This book by Salley Vickers is about the lives of a family. The main focus of the story is Will. At the start of the book we learn he is in hospital after a serious accident. Initially the narrator is Hetta (Will's siste......more

Goodreads review by Beverley on September 03, 2016

A masterfully written family drama. This book grabbed me instantly with its beautifully descriptive language and its web of well drawn, emotive characters. Engrossing throughout, the story expertly draws the multi-stranded stories together, whilst deftly revealing the tragic tangle of events and swe......more

Goodreads review by Cass on July 19, 2017

'People may get used to terrible things but I don’t believe they get over them. They may go on, but that is because they have to, which is not at all the same.’ I loved this sentiment from Salley Vickers’ novel Cousins (Viking Books Penguin Random House 2016), an ambitious tale of intergenerational......more

Goodreads review by Tripfiction on November 29, 2016

Novel set in NORTHUMBERLAND (a family in flux) This is the story of one family’s construct, explored from several different – female – viewpoints and across generations. Betsy, Bell and Hetta. It is a diary-style narrative, a stream of consciousness, of musing and narration, how generations are influ......more