The national telepathy

In September 1933, the Peruvian Rubber Company delivers nineteen Indigenous people from the Amazon to a Buenos Aires businessman. Unexpected among the human cargo is a box, harboring a sloth with a fascinating yet terrifying secret: the ability to create erotically explosive telepathic connections between people. What ensues is a raucous satire of men’s fear of women’s bodies, of the illusion of logic in the structures of so-called civilization, and the way class and race obscure identities when the observer is a man with power. In ‘The National Telepathy’, Roque Larraquy, one of the most original voices in contemporary Argentine literature, brings us a literary highwire act, an over-the-top comic grotesque about atrocity. This shocking, bizarre, funny, imaginative novel lays all-too-bare the secret longings and not-so-secret machinations of a social class that will stop at nothing in order to stay on top.