Tamara Silva Bernaschina: "I can't remember a time when I wasn't writing."

Uruguayans grow up with Horacio Quiroga 's stories. They're young children, and they're already reading them in school. They're mostly spectral, sinister, mysterious tales, but with a very lucid undertone. "That's how we turn out," laughs Tamara Silva Bernaschina . Because that's also how the eight stories in "Larvas" (Páginas de Espuma) , his Spanish debut, are: unusual, strange, dark, and poetic.

Of course, no one should expect modernist stories full of difficult words. No, no, and no. Tamara Silva Bernaschina renews any classic by hyperconnecting it to contemporaneity and current concerns. In this way, we encounter the body as that strange friend we never really know; desire in its most uncomfortable and desperate forms; humanized animals and animalized humans in disconcerting mirror games. The imagination of this very young writer is her own and, therefore, relevant. "I don't remember a time in my life when I wasn't writing. What I remember is starting to read Uruguayan authors and thinking, hey, publishing is possible! It's not such a strange thing," says Silva Bernaschina, born in Minas Gerais in 2000.

The book kicks off with "My Pretty Little Louse." As if it were a reversal of the opening of Mircea Cartarescu's "Solenoid," here the boy with lice is enchanted by his parasites. Perhaps too enchanted. Secrets that are not revealed, disconcerting family histories, and an exaltation of the strange as a gene that reveals reality are the tools Silva uses to hook us. "I see the story as a window we peer through until someone slams it shut. There is never a final resolution. When it's over, we are the ones who have to make sense of what we have seen," says Silva Bernaschina.

The author burst onto the scene in Uruguay in 2023 with 'Natural Disasters,' which will also be published by Páginas de Espuma next year. It reached nine editions and made her the new hope of young Uruguayan literature. This was followed by the novel 'Whale Season,' which will soon be published by Tránsito and which has surpassed five editions. At that point, Juan Casamayor, editor of Páginas de Espuma, asked if she had any more unpublished stories. She said no, but that she would, and began writing the eight stories that comprise 'Larvas,' for the first time conceived for a specific publisher and with a new country of readers in mind. "It's true that I remain very faithful to the same creative universe, but I have intuitively adapted my style, thinking that I would be read beyond Uruguay and Argentina," the author notes.

Regarding the themes of her stories, Silva Bernaschina speaks extensively about the body, desire, and its flip side: repulsion and disgust. "I would say the basis is disgust, and disgust is always corporeal. Lice, maggots, urinary tract infections— I show an image that gradually cracks, until you can't see anything but that crack," the writer says.

If there's one story that articulates and unites the whole, it's ' Sand, Sand, Sand' . In this case, we find ourselves with a kind of sui generis retelling of Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying' . But here they're not dragging the corpse of a mother to be buried, but rather that of a mysterious mare thrown into the river, while others speak. "I love animals, and when I gave the mare a voice, a thousand new possibilities opened up for me and my imagination was unleashed. I can say that the others followed from here, although my stories follow a chain. The previous one is always linked to the next," says Silva Bernaschina.

In the last decade, we've heard many voices from Latin American writers who seem ready to renew narrative through dramatic twists and unusual atmospheres. These include Mónica Ojeda, Samantha Schweblin, and Mariana Enríquez , among many others. "The fantastic element is very strong and intuitive. I present a mystery that I don't solve, but where it's clear there's something beneath it. They're moments of incomprehension, like showing you what a dog is thinking. They allow you to understand that contradiction precisely from that feeling of incomprehension," says the Uruguayan writer.

The author doesn't see short stories as a mere exercise in contrasting novels and long narratives, but rather as a genre of its own, with value in its own right. Whether it's more or less commercial, she's delighted with the genre and has no plans to abandon it. "I don't distinguish so much between formats or genres. Both short stories and novels come from the same place. The strange thing is that here, when I've talked about the book in book clubs, some people talk to me about the first or third chapter, as if they thought it was a novel . In Spain, it seems there isn't such a tradition of short story books," she says, confused.