Opening the Pandora’s Box of Latin American Women’s Writing

Elaine Elinson reviews Kit Maude’s new translation of “We, the Casertas,” a novel by Argentine author Aurora Venturini.

By Elaine ElinsonMay 14, 2025

• Fiction

THOUGH AURORA VENTURINI wrote more than 40 books and was awarded the two top literary prizes in her native Argentina, the first English translation of her fiction, Cousins, was published only in 2023, almost a decade after her death. We, the Casertas is her second novel to appear in English, this month via Soft Skull Press. Both were translated by Kit Maude, the Buenos Aires–based literary translator who has also translated works by Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar.

In addition to her many published novels, Venturini’s literary executor Liliana Viola estimates that she left behind more than 60 unpublished manuscripts, all written on a typewriter. Despite this volume of work, the author was not widely recognized during her lifetime. In 1948, she won the Premio Iniciación for her first book of poetry, El Solitario. Fifty years later, Cousins, published as Las Primas in Argentina in 2007, was awarded the prestigious Página/12 New Novel Prize—established to honor new writers!

In an online conversation with me, translator Maude explained his admiration of Venturini’s work and noted that “her reputation rose and fell but for most of the time was pretty much nonexistent until she won the award for Cousins, and even after that, the acclaim subsided fairly quickly.” It is only now, with a recent set of reissues and some first-time publications coming out from Spanish publisher Tusquets Editores, that her work is being more widely appreciated. “The tragedy is that she isn’t around to see it,” Maude adds.

The protagonist and narrator of We, the Casertas (originally published in 1992), Maria Micaela Stradolini—known as Chela—is, like Yuna in Cousins, a brilliant misfit, wildly adventurous, even feral, attracted by the damaged and surreal. Spurned by mainstream society, Chela finds refuge in poetry, as Yuna did in painting.

Chela is born into a wealthy, pretentious family that occupies a mansion in the city of La Plata. She never feels at home with them in the downstairs area, which she dubs the “people house,” claiming from an early age a lair in the attic, where she hides out. The adult Chela, revisiting the attic after years of living in Europe, opens a chest—her own Pandora’s box. Through the contents she finds, Chela recalls her life experiences. “I am a woman going through a chest of letters, photographs, reports, cards, and yellowing papers,” she says upon discovering a photo of herself at four, along with a reproduction of a German Renaissance engraving: “I shall describe the present state of my soul because I am Albrecht Dürer’s Allegory of Melancholy.”

An exceptionally gifted but ungainly and unruly child who at age three could read road signs and the labels on jam jars, Chela is scorned by her parents. She is berated as a beast and a burden by her mother, who prefers her pretty, fair-skinned younger sister, Lula. When Chela is nine, her father alters her birth certificate to indicate she is 13, old enough to be sent away and enrolled at the Religious Institute. She is just as alienated and tormented there: “My isolation flourished like a tropical vine.” Undaunted, Chela immerses herself in the “worlds of Math and Logic, the paradises and shades of Plato’s Dialogues,” proud that she “used the time that normal people waste washing, preening, breakfasting, lunching, drinking tea, having dinner […] to study and enrich myself.”

A report from the school condemns her “brazen rudeness,” calling her a “difficult-to-pilot ship,” and she is forced to return home. An unfortunate accident provides Chela with her only family ally, her brother Juan Sebastián. Because her pregnant mother is exposed to the rubella Chela had contracted, Juan Sebastián is born deformed and mentally disabled. He has an enormous head atop a tiny misshapen body, drools constantly, and speaks only two words: “yes” and “Chela.” Rejected by the rest of the family, he is lovingly cared for by Chela, who describes him as “part insect, part fruit, part flower.”

Chela seeks companionship in animals, taking in a wounded owl named Bertoldo, several stray cats, and a moribund lizard, Josefina. Her most faithful friend is a turtle, Bertha, whose shell she pierces so she can wear her on a silver chain around her neck. Chela even describes herself in animal terms, at one point calling herself a “repulsive beast.” Speaking of her first love affair with an older married man, she says, “I clung to his side like the carapace on a crustacean […] always a little slimy, a little clumsy sliding up and down his body, wet with tears and mucus.” After the affair ends disastrously, she is heartbroken: “I was a hungry beast, a grieving animal shivering from the cold, on the point of howling in pain.”

When her mother dies and President Juan Perón expropriates the family mansion, Chela embarks on her travels, guided by the literature she loves. In Chile, she meets Pablo Neruda, publishes her own poetry, visits Easter Island, and becomes addicted to little blue sleeping pills. She is accompanied by the poetry of Rimbaud and by her beloved Bertha. In Paris, she shops for lettuce for the turtle and puts her to sleep in a Limoges soap dish. In Madrid, Chela finds an image of herself in Goya’s gloomy paintings. “[T]hese are portraits of us, you at seventy and me at a hundred,” a friend tells her. She sees her family reflected in Velázquez’s 1656 painting Las Meninas: “The infanta Margarita reminded me of Lula, the only normal child, and the dwarves of Juan Sebastián.” But it is in Italy that Chela makes her most significant discovery. She meets her great-aunt Angelina, another oddly shaped but brilliant woman, who reveals their family’s history and shows her true love.

Venturini’s language is exquisite, whether describing landscapes or people or even grotesqueries. Chela loves climbing poplars, cypresses, and “willows whose crystal sap is like a weeping person mopping up the tears with a green handkerchief.” Chela watches as “the mist swept over and hid Cape Faro from sight, embroidering Aspromonte in lace strewn here and there with sparkling bursts of light.” Her mother’s coloring is “a smoky ivory, toasted opal.” She regards her brother Juan Sebastián: “I stared at his dirty nightshirt, his tiny Lilliputian feet, and the enormous empty head on the pillow. But I knew that his horrifying appearance concealed a beautiful soul.” The author’s macabre descriptions extend even to delicacies. On arriving in Sicily, Chela is offered an edible relic of Saint Agatha: “candy in the shape of severed breasts, dripping with crimson sugar. On this island, even the sweets were tragic.” Maude’s superb translation seamlessly conveys the poetic, unique, and often bizarre nature of Venturini’s prose.

Between Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral—who in 1945 became the first (and so far only) Latin American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature—and popular contemporary novelists such as Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel, there are few Latin American women writers who have found publishers or wide audiences in the United States. (An exception is fellow Argentine Luisa Valenzuela, whose work enjoyed a heyday in translation in the 1980s and ’90s, though it has since lapsed into obscurity even though, at 86, she continues to publish.) This is in great contrast to the many male Latin American novelists, especially Boom writers like Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, whose works have been widely translated and acclaimed around the world.

Lucía Guerra-Cunningham, editor of the 1990 anthology Splintering Darkness: Latin American Women Writers in Search of Themselves, writes in its introduction that “critical discourses about Latin American literature have been severely tinted by masculine values which have favored men’s literary production, relegating women’s texts to a secondary place in the conventional canon.” She notes that, in Latin American literature created by women, “one frequently finds the image of womanhood as an existential condition overwhelmed by social repression,” giving the example of Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos, in whose work “woman, like the moon, is an eclipsed figure, half of her face […] darkened by a patriarchal society.” Guerra-Cunningham edited the collection as a “conscious attempt to develop a new critical discourse.”

Translator Maude agrees that the scales have been tilted towards men, noting that, historically in Latin America, “women simply didn’t get the same opportunities or attention even when they were writing as well as or (most likely) better” than men. As a result, he offers, “English-speaking readers have been deprived of wonderful writing.” Yet he adds that, right now, there’s a fairly substantial correction underway, with some superb new translations of other Argentine writers including Mariana Enríquez and Camila Sosa Villada (some of them his own). He also mentions Mexican novelist Fernanda Melchor and Bolivian short story writer Liliana Colanzi, saying that world literature owes these figures “an enormous debt that is only just beginning to be repaid.”

Still, Maude notes, the reasons for Venturini being overlooked are quite unique to her—specifically, her somewhat spiky personality, uneven output, and idiosyncratic approach to self-promotion. This is underscored by the fact that she is not included in Guerra-Cunningham’s anthology, or in two subsequent critical studies, Magdalena García Pinto’s Women Writers of Latin America: Intimate Histories (1991) and Brígida M. Pastor and Lloyd Hughes Davies’s A Companion to Latin American Women Writers (2012).

Venturini, like her protagonist Chela, grew up in La Plata, was besotted with literature, and spent many years in exile in Europe. Yet it is difficult to know how autobiographical this novel is. Maude asserts that “a lot of her life pops up in her work.” For example, Chela’s affair with a much older man is probably drawn from the author’s own experience. Yet Maude also argues that Venturini “seems to have made up a tragic past for herself that bears no relation to reality.” In fact, he explains, Venturini’s “siblings once summoned Aurora to a meeting demanding that she stop writing such terrible things about her protagonists’ families because people assumed that she was writing about them. She refused.”

But Venturini’s exquisite prose and her boldness in diving deep into the consciousness of a troubled, outcast young girl, one who defiantly chooses her own uncompromising way in the world, makes this a novel well worth reading.