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SHORT STORIESOTRO PLANETA
“Siren girls that match on OkCupid; desire that moves from a brother who suffered an accident to his healthy and possessed sister; the broad range of possibilities that implies friendship and its frictions, and the ever-present body, always there, in the middle of everything. Bodies in the explorations of their possibilities, of what is owned but unknown, of what is alien and is discovered. Bodies that act and get entangled in the confusion of what is real with what is representation. Sick, altered, symbiotic, mutating, hybrid, cyborg, cannibal bodies. Bodies that get lost or that are found, and in the illusion of total communion, “intertwine their legs like serpents and spread the spell and the venom from one to the other”.
These short stories by Agostina Luz López are populated with mental conversions, mystic transformations and physical metamorphosis. The skin of her characters is usually permeable, light to the extent it can barely function as a boundary to hold the tissues it contains. To what extent is a body our own or somebody else’s? Which is the edge that divides the animal from the human, the mundane from the mythical? How does a body manage to be part of its surroundings, turn into landscape, beach, mountain, and can no longer stop being that? In the eight short stories that make up Otro Planeta (Another Planet), Agostina explores possible answers to these questions and, with thoroughness and freshness, digs deep into the desires of her characters —“that thing they have in surplus, that is not theirs but they carry inside, like a baby”— until dazzling and astounding us completely”.
Federico Falco.
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