Out of the Cage

By Fernanda García Lao

Out of the Cage opens in 1956, in Argentina, with the freakish death of Aurora Berro, and descends into a dark philosophical exploration of humanity and mortality. In the midst of her family's celebration of a national holiday, an LP, careening through the air like a "demented boomerang," severs her jugular. Her family- an agglomeration of perversions, deformities, and obsessions-seems at first not to notice, singing on. Aurora is left behind in a voyeuristic limbo as an omniscient first-person narrator, to observe the depravity of her family and reflect on the farce of her life and human existence.

Fernanda Garc a Lao has been called "the strangest writer of Argentine literature," and in Out of the Cage, she lives up to that distinction. The book is saturated in strangeness, a blend of formal experimentation, eroticism, grotesque theatricality, and dark humor that evokes the absurdist fictions of Witold Gombrowicz and the style of Silvina Ocampo. The result is a macabre and fantastic vaudeville, a tragicomedy, a kind of Dadaist opus against ideas of eternal beauty and fixed identity, against absolute concepts and universality.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1646050452
• ISBN13: 9781646050451
• Release Date: March 2021
• Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.11 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.4"