Highbrow/Low Commitment Book Club: We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
A bimonthly book club for the busy literature lovers featuring titles around 200 pages or less.
June’s selection is We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers (196 pages). Lyrical and swashbuckling, tender and surreal, this novel finds glimmers of hope for the future in the brutal history of colonial Latin America.
Deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio de Erauso begins to write a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the Basque convent he escaped as a young girl. Since fleeing a dead-end life as a nun, he’s become Antonio and undertaken monumental adventures: he has been a cabin boy, mule driver, shopkeeper, soldier, and conquistador. Now, caring for two Guaraní girls he rescued from enslavement and hounded by the army he deserted, this protean protagonist contemplates one more metamorphosis.
Based on a real figure of the Spanish conquest, We Are Green and Trembling is a queer baroque satire, a surreal picaresque rich with wildly imaginative language and searing critique of subjugation, colonialism, and tyranny of all kinds.
Club meets in person at the Clinton Hill branch every other month. Register online for updates and reminders.
Copies of the book are available for pick up at the branch, just ask at the reference desk. Library card required for check out.
