I first heard of Aurora Venturini’s Kusinerna (Spanish: Las primas) in a review in an issue of Karavan a few years ago. I remember sitting in Konserthuset during intermission and reading about a pitiable yet terrifying character zooming around in a wheelchair. Then I forgot about it until my international WhatsApp book club picked Las primas—more specifically than that, I forgot about it until I came to a chapter in Kusinerna with a…pitiable yet terrifying character zooming around in a wheelchair.
Ah hah!
Kusinerna is a story about an impoverished family told through the perspective of the daughter Yuna, who claims that all the women in her family are “freaks” in some way or other, including herself. The nature of her own disability is unclear except that it’s tied to a difficulty with language, which gives rise to a distinct literary style and occasional breaks in the fourth wall. Her sister Benita is the one in the wheelchair, and seems to be seriously handicapped both physically and mentally. One of their cousins on their mother’s side, Petra, has dwarfism while the other cousin, Carina, has six toes on each foot. There we have our titular cousins.
Yuna and Petra are the only two who are capable of living more or less independently in the world. Yuna shows an early knack for drawing and art that more than makes up for her struggles with language, and as the book progresses she is easily able to support her family. Petra, on the other hand, quickly turns to sex work to earn money.
Lots of other reviews talk about the book’s portrayal of misogyny, patriarchy, abuse, and any other number of awful things. Very true, this is all in there! There is definitely a lot that happens in the book, and most of it has to do with suffering and abuse. But getting too into the weeds where plot is concerned would spoil quite a bit and somehow feel overly reductive. It doesn’t seem like Venturini is trying to shock anyone with the events of the story; they’re more the foundation of some seriously acerbic dark comedy. Lorna Scott Fox’s review at the Times Literary Supplement calls Cousins “breezy and brutal,” a perfect description. When you use Yuna’s distinctive, almost manic narrative voice (run-on sentences abound, for example, because she finds punctuation tiresome and complicated) to relate some of the worst things that can happen to a person, it transcends misery porn and becomes that most vaunted of all things: Social Commentary.
The comparison that springs to mind for me is Paul Pen’s El brillo de las luciérnagas (English: The Light of the Fireflies). It’s not a fair comparison, maybe, since the only thing they have in common is Spanish and brutality towards women. But without a narrator like Yuna, the brutality never really elevates and it just stays at a deeply unpleasant level of misery and torture porn for the entire time. Brutal yes, breezy not so much. While I blazed through Cousins at lightning speed, Fireflies is one of the rare books that I have consciously, deliberately chosen to not finish. This is where spoilers come in handy, and I’m glad GoodReads users delivered so I could decide to spend my time reading something else instead.
It would be remiss of me not to mention that Venturini was also just a really cool and interesting and talented person! Nothing else to add there, just felt I should make that clear.
The Swedish translation by Hanna Nordenhök was also a delight to read, and a credit to her craft considering how many puns and plays on words there must have been to translate. More than a lot of our other WhatsApp book club choices, Cousins led to a lot of discussion about puns and translations: for one original Spanish joke about snacks and pickaxes early in the book, in English it was rendered about bird beaks and pecking, in Swedish about rodents and gnawing, and in German about sofas and canapés.
The best possible book club pick!
