An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country
Elisa Taber
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"An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country is a kaleidoscopic fieldwork documenting place as character, and the character place lends, as through a magnifying lens made of stained glass. Patient and meditative, acute and animate, aromatic and auditory—this is a captivating, nearly mythological work of tableau and vignette in the shape of a pilgrimage. A threshold into a new way of writing."
—Sarah Gerard, author of True Love
“Elisa Taber writes with the economy of a poet, the precision of a translator, and the imagination of a novelist, bringing a sharp ethnographic eye to her singular descriptions of Paraguay. Original, arresting, and strikingly cinematic, An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country is a compelling text—experimental yet accessible, challenging yet thoroughly satisfying.”
—Hugh Raffles, author of The Book of Unconformities
“This is a book of exceedingly thick description, by turns memoir, parable, sociological study, dirge. A self-professed “foreigner,” Taber travels to the place of her birth, a Mennonite colony. Here, as she attempts to see, she discovers a series of insoluble blindspots, in the process bringing to light questions about what language or poetry could be adequate to a site she hopes to witness but to which she can never fully return.”
—Lucy Ives, author of Loudermilk
“A birth tree, worn sneakers, blood and ocean. Taber’s field writings are delicately precise, carefully tracing the speculative life of a third generation Mennonite woman.”
—Maria Fusco, author of Legend of the Necessary Dreamer
“An Archipelago in Landlocked Country offers a unique three-part journey deep into the heart of Paraguay. The Mennonite colony where the author was born and its neighbouring Indigenous community provide the background and inspiration for a filmic travelogue, a collection of short stories, and a novella. Taber is an astute observer, able to capture minute and surprising details while maintaining a deep respect for her characters, a personal appreciation for their histories and mythologies, and a gift for crafting wise contemporary fables. Her poetic sensibility and disarmingly precise prose combine to propel this vivid exploration of an existing territory as re-imagined in the present and into the future.”
—Joseph Schreiber, 3: AM Magazine
“An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country is consumed with looking and as such, offers a style of seeing so obsessed, so careful, and so meticulously considered that it borders on devotional. Taber’s world is occupied by those who ‘wish the air was thicker and less translucent. Not to impede sight and movement but to render it visible.’ Relentlessly, we are reminded that to gaze and to be gazed upon is to be bound up, inextricably, in the web of memory, imagination, boundaries, and bodies.”
—Candice Wuehle, author of Bound and Death Industrial Complex
“A stunningly poetic triptych, arresting in its mastery, told in spare yet rich, affecting style, An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country is utterly transportive. Taber’s lyric tapestry transports the reader to starkly contrasting worlds within a singular region, of Paraguay and the human heart. Laced together, every microscopic detail adds a strand to a larger, sweeping portrait of utterly absorbing people, places, and journeys we are fortunate Taber allows us to encounter.”
— Liza Monroy, author of Mexican High and The Marriage Act
"Slipping through layers of the commonplace, the mythic, nation identity; lack thereof, Taber's An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country deftly investigates a rich seam present at the collapse of the lyrical and the novelesque. An Archipelago presents transformative potentials for both genres, at a moment when the held tenets of the two appear on the precipice of total disintegration."
—Andrew Hodgson, author of Mnemic Symbols
"Fine grained particles of red soil, sand and dust fill the air. They speak to what is uprooted, leveled, in a state of upheaval. They speak to the memory clinging to and settling on buildings, to what endures and preserves time, to what obscures the distant view and sharpens the focus on the home. An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country gives an intimate account of Indigenous Nivaklé people and Mennonite shared realities through a narrative interplay of minute on-site observation, traditional Nivaklé myth, personal history and fiction. Elisa Taber’s work is always twofold—her attempt to unweave a densely knit society, is undone—and the same time the most articulate—when the fabric is interlaced with the inextricable memories and hopes of generations. It is a past and future that blur together and connect and all living things without hierarchies. An exceptional book and author."
—Nina Valerie Kolowratnik, author of The Language of Secret Proof
An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country is the lyrical storytelling of fieldwork conducted in Neuland, a Mennonite colony in Paraguay’s Boquerón Department, and Cayim ô Clim, the neighboring Nivaklé settlement. The author was conceived in Neuland in 1990, and returned in 2013 and in 2016.
This multi-sequentially read book shifts in genre from ekphrastic descriptions of thirty-second films shot in Asunción, Filadelfia, and Neuland; to a short story collection inspired by metonymically translated Nivaklé myths; and finally, a novella that mythologizes the life of a third generation Mennonite woman.
These three parts are not meant to be read in order. The hypertext gestures towards the omitted films and translations. This structure attunes readers to absent presences. The author’s narratives render other kinds of realities—Nivaklé, Paraguayan, and Mennonite ways of being made over—and her own. This “unweaving” technique is inspired by ñandutí—a spider web pattern created by unraveling threads from a fabric.
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ABOUT ELISA TABER
Elisa Taber is a writer, translator, and anthropologist. Her writing and translations are troubled into being, even when that trouble is a kind of joy. She is co-editor of SLUG, guest editor of an Amerindian poetry series for Words without Borders, and editor at large at Seven Stories Press. Elisa lives between Buenos Aires and Montreal, where she is writing a PhD at McGill University on the ontological poetics of Amerindian literature.
ISBN: 9781948687133 (ebook)
ISBN: 9781948687126 (paperback)