Bloat

My fellow Venezuelans, we’re going to swim in black gold. Remember this year: 1999. We’re not just reclaiming our spring, our Thames, our Seine. We’re reclaiming our country. Mercedita lives with her mother and grandmother, reeling from the recent death of her father and the intrusion of investigators into their home. Across the street is Merced, a sex worker entangled with an oil executive, soon to have a baby. Not far away, Mercedes – known to all as Mamé – runs La Tasca, a once thriving bar, now grave-quiet as the boom times come to an end. Mercy, who works at a restaurant frequented by the powerful, is sent home after coughing up blood. These four women are connected by the alternate Caracas they inhabit, by their female bodies, by their strength in the face of the fear and violence which shadows them – and by the oil around which the life of the city and country revolves, even as the fields dry up and the executives implement a new and unsettling system of production. In visceral and absorbing prose, Bloat explores exploitation, beauty and power, conjuring up a world that is not quite ours, but is hauntingly familiar.