Colonel Lagrimas

Carlos Fonseca Suárez was born in Costa Rica in 1987 and grew up in Puerto Rico. His work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, BOMB, The White Review and Asymptote. He currently teaches at the University of Cambridge and lives in London.Megan McDowell is a Spanish-language literary translator from Kentucky. Her work includes books by Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Lina Meruane, Mariana Enríquez, Álvaro Bisama, Arturo Fontaine, and Juan Emar. Her translations have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney's, Words Without Borders, Mandorla, and VICE, among others. Her translation of Zambra's novel Ways of Going Home won the 2013 PEN Award for Writing in Translation. She lives in Santiago, Chile.

“Beware, reader, in these pages you will experience vertigo, anxiety and joy. You will become a ghostly presence in a Borgesian world, a camera obscura, where mathematics is a secret weapon, and memory the object of an archaeological pursuit. Loosely inspired by the eventful life of the French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, Fonseca has created a gorgeous opera prima . . . Colonel Lágrimas is playful and experimental in the tradition of writers like Calvino and Queneau. Fonseca employs the magic of perspective and shifting angles to summon a Cubist portrait of a very sleepy, insouciant old man who witnessed some of the great political events of the 20th century, from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam . . . Deftly translated, the voice remains sedate, elegant, whispered even; we wouldn’t want to wake the colonel.”—Valerie Miles, The New York Times Book Review