It is not appropriate to talk about the appearance of authors in literary criticism, certainly not about that of female authors. Nevertheless, when you read a book by Karina Sainz Borgo, one question arises: What do her fingernails look like? Because whoever opens one of her novels looks into graves. With the sentence "We buried my mother in her things" began her debut "Night in Caracas". Her new book begins: "I came to Mezquite in search of Visitación Salazar, the woman who buried my children and then showed me how to bury the others."
It would be no surprise if she typed such entrances with deep black cemetery soil on her fingers. So you read on and descend into the dark stories that haunt the ghost of her home country Venezuela. "Night in Caracas", the first book by Karina Sainz Borgo, was about the young editor Adelaida. After her mother's funeral, she cannot stay at the grave for a moment, because even there Adelaida is not safe from militias. A few plots away, reggaeton thunders out of boxes, young women circling their hips at the coffin of a gang member. Adelaida hardly leaves her apartment, living there from power failure to power failure. Outside the window lies Caracas, marked by hunger, hyperinflation and looting, capital of South America's richest country at the turn of the millennium. Now go who can.
Sainz Borgo also left Venezuela in 2006, when she was 24 years old. Since then she has lived as a writer and cultural journalist in Spain. "Night in Caracas", the debut published in 2019, is a claustrophobic text and has been translated into more than twenty languages, a unique success in Venezuelan literature.
The children die, hope too
Now Sainz Borgo's second novel "The Third Land" is published on German. It is about those who leave. The young parents Angustia and Salveiro set off with their seven-month-old twins from one unspecified country to another. One reason is a mysterious disease that affects men in particular, making them apathetic and decomposing their memory. The days are hot, the nights cold. And even the first sentence makes it clear: It's not going well. The children soon die and with them the hope of a better life.
Meanwhile, everything is scarce in the border region: food, water. Even a dignified farewell to the dead is hardly possible. But Visitación Salazar offers it: she is a gravedigger in her own illegal cemetery. It is located outside the village of Mezquite. She has called it "the third country". For a small or no donation, she buries all those who die on the run. The children of Angustias are now also on the third land. So Angustias stays, goes to Visitación to the hand, fetches corpses and gasoline. Her husband Salveiro has long since disappeared.