ALL THAT DIES IN APRIL

A woman sets off from her mountain home in search of the ocean and the possibility of a better life.

Lina Ramos and her husband, Relicario Cruz, live in Argentina, in the high, arid quebrada—literally the word for a dry ravine in Spanish. Though their family has been there for generations, life in the quebrada is very difficult, particularly since a drought struck the region, and Lina believes they need to leave. Their son, El Tala, left 14 years ago with Lina’s brother Camilo, seeking a better life. Yet, even as the area around him empties of life, Relicario will not abandon their ancestral home. “If we leave,” he tells Lina, “the dead will become nameless and confused, because no one will be left to remind them who they were.” Though Relicario plans to spend the rest of his life attending to this sacred duty, Lina, counseled by the village healer, Octavia, makes up her mind to follow the mountain streams in the direction they flow, hoping to come to the sea. Relicario is stunned by Lina’s absence and soon decides to follow her. Accompanied by a wise donkey named Jumento and the bones of his mother and father—all of his family he could fit in the cart—Relicario begins a long, arduous journey, guessing Lina’s course at every turn, while his wife forges on before him, entering into worlds and ways of living that Relicario cannot begin to imagine. Meanwhile, a series of coincidences conspires to create a reunion no one in the Ramos-Cruz clan could have anticipated, all as the destructive torrents of April begin their seasonal scouring of the land. Spare and yet echoing with voices, Travacio’s English-language debut captures the haunting cycles of death and displacement but also of life, joy, and the succor of community in a place where “families come together and break apart…as easily as storm clouds in the sky.”

An illuminating fable of family—both blood and found.