Overview

In 2007, Aurora Venturini stunned Argentine readers when her darkly funny and formally daring novel, Cousins, won a newspaper's award for a first novel. She had already written more than thirty books, but it was only at the age of eighty-five that she was widely recognised as a radical voice in Spanish-language literature. Widely regarded as Venturini's masterpiece, Cousins is the story of four women from an impoverished, dysfunctional family in La Plata, Argentina, who are forced to suffer a series of ordeals including disfigurement, illegal abortions, miscarriages, sexual abuse and murder, narrated by a daughter whose success as a painter offers her a chance to achieve economic independence and help her family as best she can. Neighborhood mythologies, family, female sexuality, vengeance, and social mobility through art are explored and scrutinized in the unmistakable voice of an unforgettable protagonist, Yuna, who stares wildly at the world in which she is compelled to live; a voice unique in its candidness, sharp edge and utterly breathtaking power. Cousins is the jewel in Venturini's oeuvre - mischievous and stylish, vital and mysterious . . . and completely original.

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Aurora Venturini was born in 1921 in La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina. She was an adviser to the Institute of the Child's Psychology and Re-education where she met and became intimate friends with Eva Peron. In 1948, Jorge Luis Borges personally handed her the Initiation Award (Premio Iniciacion) for her book El solitario. She studied Psychology at the University of Paris, where she self-exiled for 25 years after the Liberating Revolution. In Paris she lived in the company of Violette Leduc and became a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Eugene Ionesco and Juliette Greco. She translated and wrote critical essays on poets such as Isidore Ducasse, Conde de Lautreamont, Francois Villon and Arthur Rimbaud; for the translations of the latter two authors she received the Iron Cross decoration granted by the French government. In 2007, she received the Pagina/12 New Novel Award for Las primas (Cousins). She died on November 24, 2015, in Buenos Aires at the age of 92.

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