This brief novel, written by Selva Almada and translated from Spanish into English by Annie McDermott, tells the story of two men, Enero and El Negro, who embark on a fishing trip on a nameless South American river with a teenager named Tilo, the son of their late friend Eusebio. This is the final entry in a loosely connected trilogy. Like the island, Eusebio’s absence is a tangible presence throughout; without him, all three feel like “a part of them, real and concrete, had to die as well.” This is literally the case for Enero, who loses a finger soon after Eusebio’s passing. For those left behind, his absence constitutes a dissipation that extends well beyond metaphors of loss. After spending hours struggling to reel in a stingray, the three end up shooting it before hanging it from a tree and letting it rot. The narrative alternates between the present, in which local men take offense at the treatment of the stingray and young women distract the fishermen, and a series of past events whose significance is slowly and uncannily laid bare. The tragedies in “Not a River” are often met with denial. Unable to come to terms with Eusebio’s death, Enero flirts with girls and shirks his problems, often wearing the expression of “a little kid who’s screwed up.” A child at the time of his father’s death, Tilo’s grief is painfully acute. At Eusebio’s funeral, Tilo lays under the casket wondering whether his father is actually inside, wanting to believe he has only disappeared. Later, Tilo joins his cousins as they laugh and kick dirt onto the coffin. Sharing the spotlight with these characters is Siomara, a local of the island. While she is only tenuously connected to the main characters — her brother and daughters bump into them — she is in the depths of misery. Her trauma — which no one, including Siomara herself, is eager to confront — reignites a childhood obsession with fire. The house she shares with her daughters is slowly being stripped of its furniture; starting fires is a way of “getting rid of her anger, pushing it out of her chest.” Sometimes the urge is so strong she resorts to burning whatever is at hand. El Negro, Enero and Tilo spend their time fishing, while Siomara repeats her chores: burning furniture, cooking, throwing food away when her daughters don’t come home. The long repetitive days chronicled in “Not a River” paint a picture of worlds rocked by grief. The present is reduced to little more than a vehicle shuttling between a lost past and the next world. Nevertheless, the author skillfully locates an insistent commitment to life and love in several of her characters — a stubborn strength that resists decay and affirms the worth of human bonds. | 