Reseña del libro "Para Medir la Marea (Novela (Roca))"
En una isla turistica en algun lugar del mar Egeo, Jacqueline, una joven liberiana, intenta sobrevivir, lo que se reduce a no morir de hambre y procurar seguir adelante despues de haber conseguido escapar al horror del regimen de Charles Taylor. Construye su hogar en una cueva que da al mar, y durante el dia se pasea por las playas soleadas ofreciendo masajes a los turistas -cinco minutos por un euro-, mientras intenta mantener un equilibrio entre su voluntad de vivir y la culpa del superviviente que la atenaza. Su orgullo, su pena y su miedo le impiden pedir ayuda, e incluso aceptar aquella que se le ofrece. Su mundo ha desaparecido y su corazon es un erial del que no sabe como salir. Esta novela hipnotica, lirica y extraordinaria nos habla de una mujer que sigue adelante a pesar de que le hayan sucedido cosas tan terribles. Una novela sobre como vivimos con lo que sabemos. / A hypnotic, spellbinding novel set in Greece and Africa, where a young Liberian woman reckons with a haunted past. On a remote island in the Aegean, Jacqueline is living alone in a cave accessible only at low tide. With nothing to protect her from the elements, and with the fabric between herself and the world around her increasingly frayed, she is permeated by sensory experiences of remarkable intensity: the need for shade in the relentless heat of the sun-baked island; hunger and the occasional bliss of release from it; the exquisite pleasure of diving into the sea. The pressing physical realities of the moment provide a deeper relief: the euphoric obliteration of memory and, with it, the unspeakable violence she has seen and from which she has miraculously escaped. Slowly, irrepressibly, images from a life before this violence begin to resurface: the view across lush gardens to a different sea; a gold Rolex glinting on her fathers wrist; a glass of gin in her mothers best crystal; an adoring younger sister; a family, in the moment before their fortunes were irrevocably changed. Jacqueline must find the strength to contend with what she has survived or tip forward into full-blown madness. Visceral and gripping, extraordinary in its depiction of physical and spiritual hungers, Alexander Maksiks A Marker to Measure Drift is a novel about ruin and faith, barbarism and love, and the devastating memories that contain the power both to destroy us and to redeem us.
