Book Reading - The Cracks We Bear (November 15)

On Saturday, November 15 at 6pm, we welcome US-based translator Michelle Mirabella who will read from The Cracks We Bear by Catalina Infante. The Cracks We Bear has been written by Chilean author Catalina Infante and translated by Michelle Mirabella to English. The book reading will be followed by a Q&A moderated by local Zürich author Ellene Glenn Moore. 

About the book:
What opens as a story on matrescence reveals itself to be an exploration of memory, trauma, and grief—personal, familial, and national—as the protagonist, Laura, struggling in her new motherhood, revisits stories from her own daughterhood and coming of age in a home, in a country, where the adults are still living with the trauma they experienced under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Borrowing elements of a Bildungsroman observed through the sieve of memory, the story recounts the past from the present through short, vignette-like chapters, pulling from the Latin American literary tradition of the short story, that come together like a reconstructed vase bearing its cracks.

Praise for The Cracks We Bear:

The Cracks We Bear has been reviewed on the Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews

“Catalina Infante’s rich landscape of motherhood is brought to vivid life in Michelle Mirabella’s deeply poetic translation. Not a word is wasted.”

–Anton Hur, judge for the 2025 International Booker Prize and author of Toward Eternity

“A piercing account of both motherhood and daughterhood in their ever-changing voracities and chiaroscuros. The Cracks We Bear vividly captures ‘a duplicity of the present or a simultaneity of all the presents’ inhabited by narrator Laura as she struggles to reconfigure herself postpartum and to confront her own late mother. Mirabella’s translation is keenly attuned to the pressures, losses, and longings moving through Infante’s prose: a memorable debut from both writer and translator.” 

–Robin Myers, poet and translator of A Father Is Born

“Raw and incisive, Catalina Infante’s The Cracks We Bear, translated from Spanish by Michelle Mirabella, is a story of mothers, daughters, and what each must bear forward from her past. Infante’s unflinching writing, rendered by Mirabella with an exquisite sense of tension, is a tight-rope act of brutality and tenderness, grounded at all times by a fierce loyalty to what is real in motherhood. An absolutely vital English-language debut.” 

–Ellene Glenn Moore, poet and award-winning author of Passage

"The Cracks We Bear is a beautiful work of memory and image craftsmanship. What does anyone know about being a mother? The book seems to scream at us. And there is no answer, only a woman's search in the face of the abyss of her motherhood. Behind this book lies a poetic and intimate truth: there are no complete stories, only pieces, fragments, and often the work of writing is not to reveal what is missing but to preserve it within the word as a secret." 

–Natalia García Freire, author of This World Does Not Belong to Us and A Carnival of Atrocities