The gaucho Martín Fierro, the creation of poet José Hernández, is one of the great figures of Argentinian literature: a singer who relates the camaraderie and hardship of cowboy life. But in Cámara’s International Booker-shortlisted novella, first published in Spanish in 2017, he’s a bit-part player in a wild trip across the pampas that leaves traditional gender roles in the dust.
The book follows China, Fierro’s neglected wife, who leaves her poor village to join a Scottish adventurer called Liz who has a wagon well stocked with curry leaves, cakes, lavender-scented sheets and literature. The pair travel across the plains towards an army camp and the territory of the Iñchiñ people, where Liz has a land claim. Nature is ever-present: the guinea pig tunnels that honeycomb the pampas, the limpid rivers of the north, the heat that sets the land ablaze “like a wet stone in the midday sun”.
The Adventures of China Iron sets British industry and Argentine expansion against the sisterhood of the wagon and an indigenous society of fluid genders and magic mushrooms. Sentences bound on from one page to another, seeming almost as long as the vignette-like chapters, in a thrilling and mystical miniature epic. This story, drunk on words and visions, is an elegy to the land and its lost cultures.
• The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated by Iona Macintyre and Fiona Mackintosh, is published by Charco (RRP £9.99).
