The Annunciation

Book excerpt: Fiction. Translated by Michelle Gil-Montero. As a writer and critic of hemispheric influence, María Negroni has drawn from sources as diverse as Lautréamont, Pizarnik, and Ridley Scott's Alien to build a model of art as museo negro--repository of the anti-real, the anti-rational, of resistance itself. Her novel THE ANNUNCIATION, brought into English with perpetual nimbleness by the poet Michelle Gil-Montero, traces the afterlife of a member of a revolutionary cadre who flees Argentina for Rome amid the state violence of the Dirty War. Visited by spectres of the human and artistic companions of her many past lives, the narrator weighs up the costs of both art and politics, of language and violence, of exultation and extinguishment. In an era of extinctions--including the extinction of hope--THE ANNUNCIATION is a darkly radiant work, a nightship cruising the galaxy, packed with unlikely resources for the dispossessed, powered by the refusal-to-comply.