A review by incrediblefran
The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

adventurous emotional hopeful reflective fast-paced

4.25

This book is like a painting. It’s fixated on light and colour and space, and reading it is a sensory experience. A response to “Martin Fierro”, the epic Argentine poem, “China Iron” brings life and interiority and love to Fierro’s young abandoned wife. She strikes out on a journey across the Argentine pampas in the late-1800s, when Argentina is at a turning point: the growing expansionist horror of colonialism meets the remaining natural world and indigenous peoples. It’s full of love and beauty, but also brutality and violence. 

“I wish you could see us; but no one will. We know how to leave as if vanishing into thin air: imagine a people that disappears, a people whose colours, houses, dogs, clothes, cows and horses all gradually dissolve like a spectre: their outline turns blurry and insubstantial, the colours fade, and everything melts into the white cloud. And so we go.”