Organic Remains of a Former World by Paul Brito

Organic Remains of a Former World by Paul Brito, translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Tittler

On the edge of the Colombian Caribbean, where the Magdalena River empties into a sea thick with rotting trunks, a half-built subdivision rises from a desert of deforested sand. A boy moves there with his family — pioneers of a place not yet finished — and sees, fleetingly, a stag with antlers like the branches of a tree. The animal vanishes the moment he thinks of it. The image stays for the rest of his life.

Organic Remains of a Former World is a memoir told in fragments — stories, vignettes, sudden glimpses — that together form the portrait of a family, a coastline, and a vanishing natural world. A mother carrying two backpacks and the weight of an entire household. A father called El Canario, who leaves for Spain and returns hollowed out, drowning slowly in drink. A quarry that becomes its own ecosystem of swamps, dwarf alligators, vipers and hummingbirds. Cousins splashing in a cement-stained reservoir under a brick-red sun. The fearsome nettle, the stalking snake, the monarch butterfly, the canary.

Paul Brito writes with the precision of a naturalist and the tenderness of someone returning to the scene of his own becoming. Every memory here is also a small ecology — leaf and bark, fruit and rot, the human family entangled with the family of living things. Behind the lyricism sits a harder reckoning with poverty, debt, alcoholism, absence, and the slow grief of watching a place and a parent disappear at once.

Beautifully rendered into English by Jonathan Tittler, this is contemporary Latin American literature at its most intimate — closer in spirit to the autobiographical essay-fictions of Sergio Pitol, Maria Stepanova or Mark Doty than to magical realism. For readers of literary memoir, translated fiction, and writing that braids the personal with the natural world.

A new title from Moving Words, an imprint of The Antonym Collections.