This month, we’re reading two unnerving tales that traverse South America and Western Europe.
Galápagos: A Novel
Fátima Vélez, trans. Hannah Kauders (Astra House, 208 pp., $22, December 2025)
The book cover for Galapagos
Galápagos makes no secret that it’s a novel about decay. On the first page, Lorenzo, the narrator, feels his pinky nail coming loose “like a baby tooth.” Soon, all his nails have fallen off, and both of his hands are wrapped in pus-soaked bandages that he tries to ignore, like a bad dream. He has traveled from Colombia to Paris in a desperate attempt to recover his old life, and former lovers, but ends up being thwarted by the grotesque reality of his ailing body.
It soon becomes clear that Lorenzo, along with his friends and lovers, has caught a deadly illness. To escape reality, this cast of bohemians—from sculptors to painters to heirs, all of whom seem to float through life—embarks on a feverish voyage around the Galápagos, where they sail in an oneiric space between life and death, clothed in the skins of sacrificed loved ones.
New York-based Colombian author Fátima Vélez’s take on the plague novel is ambitious and alarming (and certainly not for the squeamish). It’s a sort of inversion of the Decameron—that bawdy, scatological classic, which Vélez references more than once—but this time, the plague-ridden are the ones hiding away (in a boat called, of all things, the Bumfuck).
On the ship, the passengers exchange rambling stories each night that range from the political to the erotic. These digressions are ripe with literary and historical allusions: the Bible, Aeolus’ bag of winds, the prophesies of Tiresias, Charles Darwin’s diaries. As the days pass, their bodies further decompose, until even speaking requires too much effort.
Despite the specter of death, the voyagers’ days are also filled with excess and delight. They feast lavishly on octopus ceviche, tortoise eggs, and suckling pig. The wildlife of the Galápagos is cause for wonder. Of the blue-footed booby, they marvel, “Why are their feet that color blue, the blue of a princess’s dress, defiance embodied by the feet of this bird. Here is a place where nature cross-dresses.”
They also seem to live at a remove from the world. Contemporary politics comes up, but only in passing. During a stay in Dresden years before the trip, Lorenzo “became obsessed with the idea of going back to Colombia to join the fight” when he heard about M-19 guerillas seizing the Dominican embassy, before backtracking because “there wasn’t much they could do anyway.”
Yet even these characters cannot exist fully out of time. The plague in the novel, which takes place in the late ’80s and early ’90s, is a clear allusion to the AIDS crisis. This historical reality only adds to the sense of horror and dread underpinning Vélez’s story, which seems to ask: What is left when the body runs out of time? As Hannah Kauders, the novel’s translator, recently wrote, “I searched Galápagos for a lesson about grief, but the text seemed less interested in teaching me how to cope and more interested in forcing me to feel.”—Chloe Hadavas
The Jaguar’s Roar: A Novel
Micheliny Verunschk, trans. Juliana Barbassa (Liveright, 192 pp., $27.99, December 2025)
The book cover for Jaguar’s Roar.
Like the Finnish book I reviewed last month, The Jaguar’s Roar takes its inspiration from a real-life museum exhibition. Brazilian author and historian Micheliny Verunschk was moved to write her novel after visiting São Paulo’s Cultural Center. There, she saw lithographs of two Indigenous Brazilian children, a girl and a boy, from the early 1800s. The faces are ubiquitous in Brazilian schoolbooks, but little is known about their lives.
Verunschk’s “first impulse was to conduct research,” translator Juliana Barbassa writes in an introduction to the English edition of The Jaguar’s Roar, which was published in Brazil in 2021. “Not finding much recorded about the two, she began to write their story, weaving together the fictional and the archival to shape one version—her version—of what might have been.” The result is a necessarily disturbing novel about the ongoing erasure and dispossession of Brazil’s Indigenous people, from Portuguese conquest to the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro.
What is in the historical record: The images of the children were created by two German naturalists in 1817. Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius and Johann Baptist von Spix ventured into the Brazilian Amazon after the Portuguese opened their prized colony to the world in 1808. The men kidnapped children from various tribes and brought them back home to Munich as “a treat for themselves, other researchers, and their king,” Maximilian I of Bavaria, Verunschk writes.
Their human loot included the two “young Brazilian savages” in the lithographs: a 10-year-old girl from the Miranha people, who was baptized into Christianity as Isabella, and a 11-year-old boy from the Juri people, who became Johann. They died of disease shortly after arriving in Germany.
Martius and Spix never noted the children’s real names, so Verunschk takes the liberty of naming them herself—and endowing them with thoughts, feelings, and backstories. The girl, Iñe-e, is the protagonist; the boy is Caracara-í. The plot toggles between several human and non-human narrators, including Iñe-e; Martius; Maximilian’s queen, Karoline; the river Isar in Munich; and a magical jaguar that Iñe-e has an encounter with as a child.
The jaguar—the “largest predator” in South America, Barbassa writes—considers Iñe-e her child, allowing the girl to reassert her power in the historical record. After her death, Iñe-e becomes a supernatural jaguar herself, able to time travel and exact revenge on her oppressors. “She saw white people driving their killing machines, bedeviling the people of the land with plagues of the worst sort,” Verunschk writes, tracing Brazilian Indigenous history all the way to the COVID-19 pandemic. Iñe-e’s story also becomes entwined with that of Josefa, a woman in modern-day São Paulo who attends the same exhibit as Verunschk and “looks at the girl and sees her own face.”
Verunschk acknowledges that she deliberately drew from “myths and stories from various Indigenous people” in crafting the book. The text is peppered with words and phrases in German, Portuguese, and the Mirahna, Juri, and Nheengatu languages, which Barbassa explains she opted not to translate to retain “some of the fecundity and the intentional disorientation of Verunschk’s prose.”
Altogether, The Jaguar’s Roar is an indictment of the “upside-down world of the whites” as well as the inability of the Western world—and Germany in particular—to take meaningful accountability for its plunder of Indigenous people. Verunschnk notes that Munich still has a Spix Street and prominently displays a Martius bust in its botanical garden. “It’s extraordinary, what people choose to be scandalized by,” Verunschk writes.—Allison Meakem
December Releases, in Brief
Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk returns with House of Day, House of Night, a kaleidoscopic portrait of a remote Polish village translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. British author Matt Greene’s dystopian novel, The Definitions, probes the nature of language in the face of amnesia. In her debut novel, When the Fireflies Dance, London-based Aisha Hassan weaves a tale of indentured servitude in contemporary Pakistan. Norwegian author Ingvild Rishoi’s short-story triptych, Winter Stories, is translated into English by Diane Oatley.
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s lost classic from 1937, Berlin Shuffle, is translated from the German by Philip Boehm. With Cape Fever, South African writer Nadia Davids crafts a gothic thriller set in a 1920s colonial outpost. The horrors of the Portuguese Empire haunt a trio of men in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Three Stories of Forgetting, translated by Alison Entrekin. And Janet Rich Edwards, a Harvard epidemiologist, makes her fiction debut with Canticle, a tale of medieval mysticism in 13th-century Bruges.—CH
