Somewhere

In Paloma Vidal's unforgettable novel Somewhere, an Argentine-Brazilian woman narrates her struggles to determine her identity and maintain relationships while moving between three languages and as many locations: Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires, her birthplace. The novel’s shifting first-, second-, and third-person narration mirrors the fragmentation the protagonist feels and encounters around her, engaging themes of immigration, identity, translation, war, and geographical estrangement. Translated into English from Portuguese for the first time, Somewhere reflects the narrator’s persistent attempts to position herself in relation to others and to make each city her own. Given our fraught geopolitical climate, the book's themes will resonate with readers of many different backgrounds.

Paloma Vidal teaches literary theory at the Federal University of São Paulo. A writer of fiction and literary criticism, she has published novels, plays, and collections of short stories, essays, and poetry. Her many books include Pré-história (2020), La banda oriental (2021), and Não escrever [com Roland Barthes] (2023). Her works engage themes of personal identity, immigration, translation, and in-betweenness in both geographic and linguistic contexts.

Jordan Benjamin Jones is an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at Brigham Young University. He is the author of various scholarly articles exploring race and human rights in literature of the Americas. He is also the translator of The Myth of Economic Development by Brazilian economist Celso Furtado.