The Bitch

Praise for The Bitch

The magic of this sparse novel is its ability to talk about many things, all of them important, while seemingly talking about something else entirely. What are those things? Violence, loneliness, resilience, cruelty. Quintana works wonders with her disillusioned, no-nonsense, powerful prose.

JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ

"The Bitch is a novel of true violence. Artist that she is, Pilar Quintana uncovers wounds we didn’t know we had, shows us their beauty, and then throws a handful of salt into them."

YURI HERRERA, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World

Pilar Quintana weaves human nature and the chaos of the universe together with extraordinary mastery. This is a novel full of mysteries about unfulfilled desire, guilt, and the places where love still exists.

GABRIELA ALEMÁN, author of Poso Wells

A raw yet beautiful story about maternity and the jungle.

HAY FESTIVAL

"The world of The Bitch is heartbreakingly true, it’s there, closer than we think, and yet remains invisible."

El País

Pilar Quintana has created a psychological tale that sweeps and drags us like the waves of the sea.

El Tiempo

To narrate the baroque jungle and American sea with such sobriety is a great triumph.

Semana

"The Bitch is far from simple in its brevity, communicating an inner universe that readers can easily identify with, by having experienced similar circumstances, reliving childhood, or relating to the portrayal of the landscape and those who inhabit it. This novel is a little gem that reminds me, in its intensity and fluidity, of The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway, or The Pearl by Steinbeck."

El Nuevo Día

A profound and moving drama about life and destiny.

WMagazín

"The Bitch is a meticulous novel, lugubrious and disquieting as the jungle, and as stifling as the sky described in the book, about to explode."

MELBA ESCOBAR, author

A tale narrated with skill and a steady hand.

El Espectador

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PILAR QUINTANA is a Colombian author. She debuted with Cosquillas en la lengua in 2003, and published Coleccionistas de polvos raros in 2007, the same year the Hay Festival selected her as one of the most promising young authors in Latin America. Her latest novel, The Bitch, won the prestigious Colombian Biblioteca de Narrativa Prize, and was selected for several Best Books of 2017 lists, as well as being chosen as one of the most valuable objects to preserve for future generations in a marble time capsule in Bogotá. The Bitch is the first of her works to be translated into English.

LISA DILLMAN lives in Georgia, USA, where she translates Spanish, Catalan, and Latin American writers and teaches at Emory University. Some of her recent translations include Such Small Hands (winner of the 2018 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Award) by Andrés Barba; Signs Preceding the End of the World (winner of the 2016 Best Translated Book Award), Kingdom Cons, and The Transmigration of Bodies (shortlisted for the 2018 Dublin Literary Award) by Yuri Herrera; and Breathing Through the Wound and A Million Drops by Víctor del Árbol.

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AUTHOR

I lived in the jungle for nine years on Colombia’s Pacific coast; when I arrived there I saw the body of a dog, a female dog. Three days later, there was no body anymore, only bones and hairs. The only traces of life were the vultures flying around and in the trees. I thought, there is a huge story here.

TRANSLATOR

As a total dog freak, I love a canine-centered novel. But I may love this book even more for the fact that it presents the jungle as one of the main characters. There’s a beautiful and unique sort of symmetry—between and among the canine, the human, and the natural worlds—in which all have both innately good and tragic components. I loved researching things like ant behavior, varieties of palm tree, and types of mosquito for this translation. These are things central to life on Colombia’s Pacific coast and therefore just as crucial to be brought across in the English as the dialogue and basic plot; more than descriptive detail, they provide the backbone and texture of Quintana’s novel.

PUBLISHER

"I just love everything about this wonderful novel: the atmospheric setting, the implicit and unembellished style, the lonely and troubled protagonist. It’s a novel as dense as the forest in which Damaris wanders while searching for her beloved stray dog. It’s as deep and bewildering as the unreliable coast of the remote and poor Colombian village Damaris calls home. In The Bitch, Quintana has done an amazing job of capturing the intimate feelings of loss and inadequacy harbored by this unique literary character."

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Pilar Quintana

THE BITCH

Translated from the Spanish

by Lisa Dillman

WORLD EDITIONS

New York, London, Amsterdam

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Published in the USA in 2020 by World Editions LLC, New York

Published in the UK in 2020 by World Editions Ltd., London

World Editions

New York/London/Amsterdam

Copyright © Pilar Quintana, 2017

English translation copyright © Lisa Dillman, 2020

Cover image © Felipe Manorov Gomes/HH

Author portrait © Danilo Costa

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed therein are those of the characters and should not be confused with those of the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available

ISBN Trade paperback 978-1-64286-059-7

ISBN E-book 978-1-64286-060-3

First published as La perra in Colombia in 2017 by Literatura Random House

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Book Club Discussion Guides are available on our website.

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"I FOUND HER there this morning, paws up," said Doña Elodia pointing to the spot on the beach where trash brought in or churned up by the sea collected: branches, plastic bags, bottles.

Poisoned?

I think so.

What’d you do? Bury her?

Doña Elodia nodded:

The grandkids.

Up in the cemetery?

No, right here on the beach.

Plenty of town dogs died by poison. Some people said folks killed them on purpose but Damaris couldn’t believe anybody would do such a thing and thought they ate the rat bait people put out by mistake, or maybe they actually ate the rats, which would be easy to catch after they were poisoned.

I’m sorry, said Damaris.

Doña Elodia just nodded. She’d had that old girl a long time, a black dog that spent all day lying around Doña Elodia’s beach restaurant and following her everywhere: to church, her daughter-in-law’s, the store, the pier … She must have been very sad but it didn’t show. Setting down one puppy—which she’d just fed with a syringe that she filled from a cup of milk—Doña Elodia picked up another. There were ten in all, and so tiny their eyes hadn’t even opened.

Born six days ago, she said. They’re not going to survive.

Doña Elodia had been old for as long as Damaris could remember, wore thick-lens glasses that made her eyes look buggy, and was fat from