“Here is a rare text, at the same time funny, subversive, political, literary, universal, accessible.”
The Adventures of China Iron, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s second novel, celebrated by critics and finalist for the International Booker Prize 2020, is the radiant and luminous epic of a woman who frees herself and takes with her the boundless landscapes of the pampas. Take Martín Fierro, a gaucho who gives his name to an epic poem, a founding myth of Argentina. Now imagine that he has a wife, China, and it is she who sets out to conquer a new way of living together. What you have here is a wonderful story of love and adventure, a queer western, and a call to found a world where all creatures would embrace each other with desire and enjoy the same love for rivers, birds or trees, and where they would never feel alone again. Gabriela Cabezón Cámara seizes a canon of Argentine literature, subverts it and turns The Adventures of China Iron into a universal and contemporary myth, full of joy, love and freedom.
