Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

A wonderful followup to the deliciously gothic 'Such Small Hands', Andrés Barba's work continues to be criminally underappreciated in the English speaking market - even with such a wonderful translation from Lisa Dillman.

This is a slippery, elusive fable and all the better for not being easily pinned down. I see Lord of the Flies and Heart of Darkness being mentioned but it made me think about The Midwich Cuckoos and Animal Farm - a stretch which gives some indication of the potentialities contained within this book and the spectrum of interpretations it enables.

Barba throws all kinds of themes into the mix and it's a measure of the authorial control asserted that this never becomes chaotic or messy: there are omens and superstitions, not least in the way the civil servant narrator overlays a pattern of his personal crime and punishment on the narrative he tells us; a representation of 'othering' and scapegoating, of the scorn and fear that can arise from the different or unknown; a discussion of language, how it may be misunderstood or fail to be understood even when it is perfectly comprehensible: how comprehension may be a choice; and a lot on the mythology of childhood where children are literal and also a kind of archetype for humanity. There's a telling moment early in when food presents left on people's door-steps overnight are destroyed causing rage - but then we learn 'they'd drawn smiley faces in the flour... this had been done out of sheer joy; they were playing' - an event that looks like malicious destruction from one viewpoint can become something quite different through other eyes.

The story is proleptic in structure - we know what has happened, we just don't know how - and I'd say the tension is internalised. It's the 'luminous republic' at the end and its dependence on democratic and unhierarchical organisation which reminded me of the tragedy of Animal Farm.

Provocative, suggestive and begging to be unpacked and discussed, this is dense and intense with a huge amount of meaning packed into a scant 200 pages.

In San Christobel, 32 children appear from nowhere to cause trouble, we don't know where they came from, we do they will meet a tragic end.

That's the premise of this novel which ticks along at a fast past and is told by a civil servant and interspersed with some newspaper cuttings etc.

There is a good build up of tension to the book, due to the tale being told looking back we have a sense of what's going to happen before it does, and the children are fairly creepy. Different to the other children of San Christobel, more threatening and alien.

The tale is concerned more with the morality of dealing with feral, hungry, children then it ultimately is with their deeds and touches on the politics of managing a town and it's people at a time of crisis.

I enjoyed this one, but it wasn't quite what I expected. I thought it was going to be more out and out horror than it was (creepy children are a great trope) and I thought it was going to go a bit deeper into the machinations of the town than it did. In the end it touched on both, when perhaps it would have worked a little better going into either of both a little deeper. For example the 32 are described well in the beginning and their association with the other children of San Christobel is interesting as is their invented language and interactions with one another, but because of the way the story is written we don't get enough of that, which is a shame.

So due to its short length the book is a taut, easy, read and is wrapped up neatly at the end, but keeping the pace up means sacrificing the opportunity for more development and ultimately I think hurts the book more than it helps it.

I loved this book! Aside from its themes, the way it is written is really captivating and masterly crafted.

The story in brief is of a small city in South America which is increasingly visited by a group of children of unknown origin and belonging. The children become less easy to ignore as their thieving and anti-social behaviour is more noticeable. The narrator is a community worker who is looking back on the events as they occurred twenty years before and he discusses the unfolding events as if writing a documentary article, quoting from academics's published work and from his contemporaries witness accounts. This gives the narrative a sense of reality and misleadingly a sense of detachment and professionalism which, as the novel progresses, becomes harder for the narrator to maintain and turns more and more into a confessional piece of writing.

We are told from the start that the whole group of children will die and the eerie and angst-ridden tone of the book is therefore set from the beginning.

The book made me ponder several issues, but perhaps what comes most strongly is the theme of society's indifference to the pain of strangers/outsiders and the consequences of that indifference both for society and outsiders.
Towards the beginning of the book the narrator quotes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, with the scene of the fox who can't play with the little prince because he hasn't been "tamed" yet. When the little prince asks what that means, the fox replies that "It means to establish ties", "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other".
The narrator refers to the "pitiful, filthy and often virus-ridden" local Nee native children as easy to forget and ignore and at first it is also easy to ignore the outsider children who start descending on the street. That is until they start losing their "innocence" and break the rules of society by committing escalating anti-social behaviours.

But who caused the children to lose their "innocence"?

As the novel progresses we discover that some of these outsider children are actually runaway children from the city. All the city's children are drawn towards and infatuated by the "outsider" children, their anarchic structure, their incomprehensible language and ways and some start running away to join the children. The society in the city increasingly becomes destabilised in its established structures and hierarchies and the hidden corruption in its fabric becomes more and more exposed as the social norms it relied upon are left behind.

There's much more to take from this book and I am sure that each reader will be able to give it their own interpretation, while thoroughly enjoying the ride. I felt perhaps the narrative slightly lagged a little towards the middle, but, regardless, the book overall still very much is deserving of its five stars rating and I look forward to reading the author's Such Small Hands.


Many thanks to Granta and NetGalley for sending me a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

#ALuminousRepublic #NetGalley

I had such a rush reading this slim novel. I finished it in a single sitting. A Luminous Republic is set in the fictional town, San Cristóbal in the remote jungle (home to the indigenous Ñeê people) in South America. Thirty-two feral children arrive in town. Nobody knows their history and they are seen as a nuisance. At first there are petty thefts and acts of vandalism but the gang quickly escalate into bigger violence and kill three people. The novel is narrated by a social worker entrusted with tracking down these children. I loved the buildup of the tense atmosphere and the chills it sent down my spine. There is a constant fight between duty and the question of where childhood innocence ends. Things get worse when the children of town start putting their ears to the ground to listen for messages from the feral gang—very Pied Piper-ish. A wonderful read.

Thank you to Granta and Netgalley for this e-copy in return for my honest review. While this novel is short, it definitely packs a punch. Keep it to read on a free evening, so that it can be enjoyed it one go.

A Luminous Republic is a novel about a group of feral children who appear from nowhere and terrorise a town in Argentina. Like Barba's previous novel Such Small Hands, this explores the latent danger in children and how a society deals with it's most vulnerable. Told from the point of view of a civil servant, A Luminous Republic lacks some of the menace of Such Small Hands, but is an unsettling and interesting read.

<i>The world of childhood was crushing us with its preconceived notions, which is why a large part of the irritation people felt for the thirty-two had less to do with whether it was natural for children to have perpetrated an act of violence than it did with the rage triggered by the fact that those very children had not confirmed their sugarcoated stereotypes of childhood.</i>

A Luminous Republic is Lisa Dillman's translation of Andrés Barba's República luminosa. After finishing the novel I found that the blurb describes it as "Lord of the Flies' meets Javier Marias", two comparisons that also sprang to my mind while reading.

[book:Such Small Hands|31944839] by the same translator/writer was a wonderful short (84 pages) but chillingly powerful tale in an orphanage. A Luminous Republic is a longer, and perhaps more ambitious, novel but perhaps lack the same unsettling punch.

The novel begins:

<i>When I’m asked about the thirty-two children who lost their lives in San Cristóbal, my response varies depending on the age of my interlocutor. If we’re the same age, I say that understanding is simply a matter of piecing together that which was previously seen as disjointed; if they’re younger, I ask if they believe in bad omens. Almost always they’ll say no, as if doing so would mean they had little regard for freedom. I ask no more questions and then tell them my version of events, because this is all I have and because it would be pointless to try to convince them that believing, or not, is less about their regard for freedom than their naïve faith in justice. If I were a little more forthright or a little less of a coward, I’d always begin my story the same way: Almost everyone gets what they deserve, and bad omens do exist.</i>

The story of the "thirty-two children who lost their lives in San Cristóbal" takes place in the early 1990s, but the narrator is recounting, and analysing, the events over 20 years later. San Cristóbal is a (ficticious) city, in the remote jungle, in an area home to the indigenous Ñeê people: our narrator was sent there as a civil servant to implement an integration program for the Ñeê based on a simple but effective one he successfully pioneered in another city, "it consisted of granting the indigenous exclusive rights to farm certain products.</i> He is there with his wife and his step-daughter, who he refers to rather oddly: <i>The post even covered the girl’s schooling (I always referred to her as “the girl,” and when speaking to her directly, simply “girl”) and offered a salary that would allow us to begin saving.</i>

The incident referred to (the Lord of the Flies part of the novel) begins when a group of 30-odd children, aged around 9-13, appear in the streets. They form their own community, one with no discernable hierarchy (to the adult's discomfort) and their adapted language, and no one is quite certain where they are from or where they are based. At first they engage in low-level begging, but they gradually become more and more disruptive, culminating in an incident (rather horribly resonant in June 2020 UK) when they run amok in a supermarket with knives, leaving three citizens dead, after which they disappear into hiding, presumably into the jungle. This leaves both the citizens of the city, and their own children, unsettled, but in rather different ways, some of the children even attracted to join them, and the authorities decide they must track the group down.

As mentioned, the narrator is looking back on the events 20+ years later and his account not only recounts what happened but analyses in some detail both primary sources (CCTV footage, TV interviews, a diary of one of the town's children) but secondary ones, for example adding his own commentary to an academic treatise:

<i>In an essay about the altercations, titled “Vigilance,” published on the first anniversary of the deaths of the thirtytwo, Professor García Rivelles dedicates one long section to the myth of childhood innocence. “The myth of childhood innocence,” she writes, “is a bastardized, facile, hopeful take on the myth of Paradise Lost. Saints, intercessors and vestals of an ersatz religion, children are charged with representing the state of original grace for adults.”

But these children, the ones who had silently begun overtaking the streets, bore little resemblance to the two versions of the state of “original grace” we’d known previously: our own children, and the Ñeê children. It’s true that the Ñeê were dirty and unschooled; yes, they were poor, and San Cristóbalites, in their shortsightedness, assumed that they were a lost cause, but the fact that they were indigenous not only took the edge off this state, in a way it also rendered it invisible.</i>

The narrator is also prone to Javier-Marias-like aphorisms of his own:

<i>People are never accepted as innocent the first time around; the greatest punishment is not having to prove yourself but having to do so over and over again. Perhaps that’s what I would have liked to have said to the bow-tied sage: that our witnesses are not to blame for the fact that something in us chose them as our unassailable interlocutor, that when it comes down to it, we are the ones who impose this pretense. No one can sustain authenticity forever, not even child witnesses.</i>

Barba's narrator doesn't quite match the rhetorical eloquence of Marias's - although I suspect that wasn't the intention, the reader not intended to marvel at his observations, but treat them in part as the pretentious thoughts of a middle-ranking functionary and in part as an indication of his own obsession with the children.

Overall, it is as interesting change in style from Such Small Hands and I had mixed views on its success. It does provide more context from and meaning to the story, but Such Small Hands left the reader freer to add their own interpretation. And this style of novel makes for a rather uneasy fictional compact with the reader: in the book's fictional world the narrator is discussing events that are familiar to those reading his treatise, meaning that any narrative tension for the reader of the novel comes from the narrator withholding information (e.g. how did the children die) that would actually be known to those to whom his account is addressed. The novel's ending, although explaining the book's title didn't quite live up to my expectations. This review expresses the issue with the narrative style well: https://chireviewofbooks.com/2020/04/09/a-luminous-republic/ and this is an interesting review/interview with the author: https://observer.com/2020/04/luminous-republic-andres-barba-interview/

Overall 3.5 stars

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC

<i>“Everything fights death, I thought, from maggots to sequoias, from the river Eré to a termite. I will not die, I will not die, I will not die.”</i>

This book was absolutely perfect for me. It covered SO many themes that I’m deeply interested in: adulthood vs childhood, civilisation vs chaos, order vs disorder, criminality vs authority, and how power is exerted by the adult-like figure of the state on the young. I’ve read one previous novel by the author, <i>Such Small Hands</i>, and enjoyed it. This one, though, is pretty stellar. It’s extremely short. It reads like a deeply eerie parable, or fable. It was especially interesting to read it now, in the context of the global protests.

<i>“Your current freedom is the guarantee of our future freedom.”</i>

The narrator is a social worker/bureaucrat who moves to San Cristóbal, an Argentinena city surrounded by jungle, filled with cicadas and stifling humidity. The city slowly but surely becomes “invaded” by a group of feral children (all between nine and thirteen years old) who eventually become called “the jungle children.” The children’s effect on the city - the way they wreak havoc, and the city’s response to them - is the basic plot of the book.

<i>“Through these children nature was paving the way for a new civilization, a civilization unlike the one we defend with such unfathomable passion.”</i>

There is a LOT going on under the surface here. As in <i>Such Small Hands</i>, the author is very good at evoking a constant sense of dread as you read - a sense of menace and horror - especially with sentences like <i>“The butchery begins.”</i> The jungle setting is very Horacio Quiroga - very Werner Herzog. Lord of the Flies is another obvious example. The narrator observes early on that the feral children are defined by their collectivity, as opposed to their individuality, and don’t seem to have a clear leader. They initially seem harmless enough, speaking their own private language and playing inscrutable games. Overall, the children bring an undefined, chaotic energy to the city. They cannot be controlled. And then things get dark. Fast.

<i>“The myth of childhood innocence, she writes, “is a bastardized, facile, hopeful take on the myth of Paradise Lost. Saints, intercessor and vestors of an ersatz religion, children are charged with representing the state of original grace for adults.”</i>

I loved the Borgesian playfulness of the book, in which documentaries, news clips, and articles about the children are referred to. The plot is filled with unexpected twists and turns. There are scary hints that the children of the city are communicating with the feral children via telepathy, sharing the same dreams. There are hints that this “republic” of feral children represents a new beginning of sorts - a new <i>way</i> to live. An alternate civilization, even. They’re frequently compared to insects, to a hive mind. They have no interest in money. Much is made of their incomprehensible rituals and artworks, as though they’re at an extraterrestrial or extinct civilization. I thought it was important that the narrator notes that early on, the children blended in with the indigenous children they’re used to seeing (a group called the Ñeê), <i>“the ones selling wild orchids and limes at traffic lights.”</i> This comparison of the feral children with the already present indigenous population feels… significant, to say the least.

<i>“Regardless of how pitiful, filth, and often virus-ridden they looked, we’d become immune to their situation. The Ñeê were poor and illiterate in the same way the jungle was green, the earth red and the river Eré heaved with mud.”</i>

This book is exactly the kind of fiction I like to read: thoughtful, dark, and substantial. You could write an excellent essay on it using Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of violence.” I’m definitely going to read more of this author’s work.

My thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley.

A Luminous Republic is an unnamed civil servant’s personal account of a strange period in San Cristóbal, Argentina, when a large group of feral children, aged 9-13, appear in the city. They beg and steal like other street children, but they have their own private language and games, and disappear into the jungle to sleep.

They evoke little more than impotent hand-wringing until the night they kill two adults in a supermarket. They promptly go to ground and the city launches a manhunt. We know from the beginning that 32 children end up dead, but we don’t find out how until the end of the story.

I found a lot to like in this short book. While there is a single narrator, he refers to other accounts of the tragedy, such as newspaper reports, sensationalist documentaries and books, and academic papers. These sources make the events he describes feel more ‘real’, and he adds to this effect by questioning their accuracy and criticising how they present ‘the facts’. He also refers to ideas and knowledge from philosophy, literature, linguistics and more, again situating the tale in the ‘real world’ as well as emphasising the importance and application of the humanities and social sciences.

The civil servant is also aware that, as many years have passed since the saga, his memories and interpretations of what happened will have altered and been re-shaped. There’s also the question of how complicit he feels in the entire business, and how this colours his telling of the story.

In this light, the story the narrator imparts has a mythological or fairy-tale quality, provoking fear in adults of what could happen if they let their children follow their nature, and curiosity in the city’s domestic children. I found it particularly interesting that, following the feral children’s disappearance, their suburban counterparts create ‘Bloody Mary’ type rituals to contact them, and claim to be able to hear them through the ground and communicate with them in their dreams. Some even run away to join them, increasing the moral panic and Pied Piper feel of the tale.

A big theme of the book is ‘childhood innocence’. The feral children have blown a hole right through the adults’ conviction that children are naturally innocent. Something the narrator mentions that really stuck with me is that the domestic children ‘perform innocence’ because they know it’s what their parents expect and want from them. It’s like the scales have fallen from his eyes about what children are like when adults aren’t around, or, as in this case, when they just don’t care how adults see them.

Even so, when he finally comes across the home the fugitives have made for themselves, he’s still shocked to see the word ‘whore’ scrawled in a sleeping alcove, and ruminates on it, considering that it ‘soiled the expression of love’ evident in the glass decorations, remnants of games, and signs of emotional closeness in the room.

I felt like he overthought this a bit - the children would have doubtless fallen out sometimes, and the writing could be the artefact of a long blown-over squabble. Additionally, although some of the feral children were clearly sexually active - at least one was pregnant - when I was a kid, we used to use ‘slut’, ‘tart’ and ‘whore’ as generic attacks rather than factual statements about the offending party. (Amusing memory of a childhood friend’s then-nine-year-old sister having written ‘[eight-year-old sister] is a HOAR’ on a bedroom wall when they were fighting!)

A Luminous Republic is an unusual, intelligent and thought-provoking read. It manages to feel simultaneously real and myth-like, and sticks with you long after the final page.

I'm not sure how to feel about this book. It grabbed me with beautiful descriptions of a South American town by a river in the jungle, and how the male narrator ended up there with his wife and her daughter. From the start, there is ominous description of a mysterious event involving strange children. It reads like a fable, and there are some beautiful parts, but there is no resolution.

This was an interesting book and i really enjoyed the story it told. Even though it was short, it still managed to pack a lot of detail and action into this. I liked the main character of the civil servant and thought that he was a compelling figure to follow the perspective of. It wasn't what i expected fully but i certainly enjoyed this.

Feral children that roam the village,stealing,causing chaos and eventually even murdering sounds like a thrilling read.
Unfortunately,this wasn't.
The narration was dry,and if I'm honest,a bit dull.
I'm not sure if something was lost in translation,or if it was supposed to read like a report to his head office.

Edmund White, introducing Lisa Dillman’s English translation of República Luminosa on Granta Books, describes Andrés Barba’s novel as “Lord of the Flies meets Heart of Darkness”, whilst admitting that this is how a Hollywood hack would pitch it and that it gives only “the crudest suggestion of this miraculous book”. Juan Gabriel Vásquez considers it as “Lord of the Flies seen from the other side” but is quick to add that this “would rob Barba of the profound originality of his world”.

What leads these respected authors to describe this novel in these ecstatic terms? Let’s start with the easy part, that is, the comparison to Lord of the Flies. There is, indeed, a vague similarity between the premise of Barba’s novel and Golding’s work. A Luminous Republic is set in San Cristóbal, a (fictional) tropical city in Argentina bordered by a river and a jungle. The residents of the city are used to seeing poor, indigenous children around, a symbol of the uneasy conviviality between the urban settlers and its three thousand Ňeê inhabitants. However, in 1994, the town dwellers notice a new phenomenon. Thirty-two feral children descend on the city. These vagrants are not Ňeê, nor is it ever clear from where they’re coming from. They seem to stick together, communicating in an indecipherable language. At first, the thirty-two are little more than a nuisance. Then, they attack a supermarket, killing two adults in the process. Terror mounts when the adults realise that the thirty-two exert some sort of psychological influence over the other children of San Cristóbal, casting a cloud of suspicion on all young people of the town.

The narrator of A Luminous Republic is a social worker who, two decades after the events, recounts the so-called “altercations” between the children and the inhabitants of San Cristobál and the manhunt mounted to catch them. One of the intriguing characteristics of the novel is that it shows us as much about this flawed narrator as it does about the events described. Not unlike District Prosecutor Chacaltana in Roncagliolo’s Red April, the narrator adopts a formal “civil servant” style in his account, sprinkling his ‘factual’ report with references to newspaper articles, documentaries, and learned studies. We realise, however, that he had a central role in the events in question and participated in some of the dubious decisions taken at the time, and so he is hardly the unbiased reporter he makes himself out to be. His ruminations about these dark events are also linked to his relationship with his wife Maia (who, unlike him, is a Ňeê), and her daughter from a previous marriage, also called Maia, whom he refers to as “the girl”. In the “altercations” between the thirty-two and the San Cristobálians there runs throughout a sense of “us and them”. There is the same diffidence between the narrator and his wife. Despite the love he feels for her, there are parts of her which remain elusive. His attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery of the thirty-two mirror his attempt to understand his companion.

White considers A Luminous Republic as an epic novel. At just 200 pages or so “it can be read in one evening” but it feels as “full” as if it were a “1000 page novel”. I would say, rather, that it feels as if it were several novels rolled into one. It’s a weird tale, a piece of speculative (supernatural? magical realist?) fiction, a Gothic fantasy, an adventure story, but also a philosophical fable which explores (and explodes) prevalent ideas about the innocence of childhood and asks pertinent questions about the demarcation good and evil.

What I found particularly surprising is that despite the “formal” tone which the narrator tends to adopt, there are passages of striking visual beauty. We get a taste of this from the very first pages, when we first glimpse San Cristóbal, with its colours “flat, vital and insanely bright: the jungle’s intense green… the earth’s brilliant red, the blue sky so dazzling it forced you into a constant squint, the dense brown of the river Eré extending four kilometres shore to shore…” But this becomes most evident in the novel’s conclusion – when we can finally understand what the “luminous republic” of the title refers to. These passages have haunting poetry which will remain with me for a long time.