Through the Forest by Laura Alcoba

Through the Forest by Laura Alcoba

French fiction

Original title – Par la forêt

Translator – Martin Munro

Source – Personal copy

I decided to join the subscription for Fum d’stampa press they’ve been going a few years and I had reeviewed a number of the earlier books before deciding to subscribe to keep up with what they are publishing. I hope in the future to be able to subscribe to more and more publishers. But this is one of ther e latest it is from a writer now based in France that moved to france when she was ten from Argentina. So her work has the beaty oif both places she has grown up. She had to move when her father a poiltical prisoner escaped to France. She recounded this event in one of her other novels. She alos translates a number of books from writers like Yuri Herrera and Fernando Melchor. This book tackles one of the hardest topics to write about Fillicide about a mother killikng her sons. A case from thirty years ago picked apart to find out why but also the aftermath of such an event on those involved at the time

It was because of this fuel oil episode that a few days before that Friday in December 1984 Claudio and Griselda woke up well before their usual time. To greet the tanker, all because of this historic coldness. So, she had come down from their loft backwards, in the dark, clinging to the ladder, searching with her toes for the rungs that she had no trouble finding. She had come to know this lodge by heart. The smallest corner. Even the gaps between the rungs of the ladder, the one that gave access to their loft and the other one too, where the children were. Claudio had cut some planks and then he had put together the two lofts, all by himself. Without that, how could they have lived with five people in there?

They need to get away from Argentina like Laura family did

The book looks back on why Girselda a mother of three suddenly onewinter day she drowned her two sons. Like the writer Griselda is living in France in exile. Our narrator tries to pick apart the events of thirty years earlier to se what lead up to Griselda actions.in Killing her sons Boris and Sacha. We are drawn back intot her writers own Past and Griselda with her husband Carlos are in Argentina this is the time of people disappearing. The family life is like a gradiual drip seeing how Griselda is slowly pushed by events her suicide attempts just little things here and there edge her to the killing of her sons. The writer shares her background with the family she finds thirty year later the sister of the dead brother and talks to her about her recollection of the events that happened and what happened to her mother after all that This is a book that loks with out to much emmotion or getting hung up to much on the judgement of the events. We also see the toll of all this on the mother that killed her sons .

She did the same with Boris and Sacha. She dressed them in their coats, she took care to cover their ears well, to slip their hands into their mittens; mittens are always easier with the little ones. The boys were still in their pyjamas, but it didn’t matter, it was only a few minutes, all she had to do was cross the street to drop Flavia off at school, just across the street. The most important thing was that they put on their big socks and their boots, under their pyjama bottoms so as not to leave any part of their calves exposed.

Her two sons that she killed getting them dressed like she did every day.

This is one of a nunber of books over the year I have read around parents killing there kids. Beside the sea is the first title that cmae to my head. but for me this is near Mother don’t by Katie Aguirre another story around a mother that killed two sons in her case twins and again this is anjournalist that knew the killer years ago. One can see the coincetioin and why Laura choset this tragic story she also like the Griselda escaped Argentina and has probably the same scares on her personality she does. This is a book that looks at the aftermath and what happened to Griselda and her Daughter after all this has happened . which o none of the other books I have read about this suject. How did Griselda and her daughter move on after all this > Have you read any books about Fillicide.

Winstons score – B story of a killing and the aftermath of a mother killing her two sons.