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Informationen zum Autor Marina Yuszczuk; Translated by Heather Cleary Klappentext "Across two different time periods, two women confront fear, loneliness, mortality, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. A breakout, genre-blurring novel from one of the most exciting new voices of Latin America's feminist Gothic. It is the twilight of Europe's bloody bacchanals, of murder and feasting without end. In the nineteenth century, a vampire arrives from Europe to the coast of Buenos Aires and, for the second time in her life, watches as villages transform into a cosmopolitan city, one that will soon be ravaged by yellow fever. She must adapt, intermingle with humans, and be discreet. In present-day Buenos Aires, a woman finds herself at an impasse as she grapples with her mother's terminal illness and her own relationship with motherhood. When she first encounters the vampire in a cemetery, something ignites within the two women - and they cross a threshold from which there's no turning back. With echoes of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and written in the vein of feminist Gothic writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado, Thirst plays with the boundaries of genre while exploring the limits of female agency, the consuming power of desire, and the fragile vitality of even the most immortal of creatures"-- Leseprobe Chapter 1 The afternoon I arrived in Buenos Aires, my ship glided across the endless surface of brown water the locals called a "river" and I gathered, speechless, that I had reached the end of my journey. The mariners shouted at one another across the deck, trying to keep us from running aground. The light was so strong that everything seemed to float in the air. It was only as we drew closer that I managed to glimpse, with heartbreaking clarity, the city's silhouette between the tall masts that interrupted my field of vision. Its low, rectangular buildings were exposed to the edge of this river that seemed like the open sea. Behind these rose the cupolas and bell towers of churches, but the scene was dominated by a semicircular, multistory building crowned by a lighthouse. This unfinished structure was the customs office, I later learned, and it gave the whole city the air of a historical neighborhood dropped by error into the newest reaches of the globe. Facing the city, countless schooners and brigantines cluttered the river. Some still had their sails raised, others bobbed sluggishly. The port itself was nowhere to be seen. Buenos Aires extended in both directions, but mud eventually conquered the coastline and I felt as if, aside from the weeks-long journey from one place to another, I had traveled to a different time. To the past, perhaps, but also to something strikingly new. What was it? On the other side, the city crumbled into land, slaughterhouses, mudflats, and cemeteries, and after that came the endless plains where the bones of other eras lay. There was ample time to absorb this scene as we awaited our turn to disembark in the waning afternoon light. In the distance, where the coastline was but mud and stone, a group of women engaged in labors I could not understand at first. I watched them move slowly, observing how some raised the hem of their skirts with one hand while the other bore something that looked heavy from the way they struggled to keep their balance on the rocks. The rustle of white cloth gave me the clue I needed: They were carrying clothes they had washed in the river and hung out to dry in the sun. As the ship drew nearer, dragging itself across the water, I could see that they were wearing aprons and bonnets in pale colors that stood out especially against the skin of the Black women, the likes of whom I had never seen before. After a time, the moon, tinted like pale fire and softened by the clouds, took possession of the sky. Aboard the vessels and along the streets that waited on the shore,...
