A short, viciously neat novel about bodies and cutting them open.

Beginning in a sanatorium outside Buenos Aires in 1907, it follows a group of doctors experimenting on terminal patients with the bright moral hygiene of men who have mistaken curiosity for ethics. A hundred years later, the novel shifts into the world of contemporary art, where the body is still being used, staged, damaged, aestheticised, and sold back as meaning.

Larraquy is not writing a big swollen medical gothic; he is doing something sharper and stranger, closer to a specimen slide with teeth. The violence is bureaucratic, the absurdity is calm, and the central question keeps mutating: when does looking become violation, and when does knowledge become a very elaborate excuse?

There is a clear Argentine lineage here — dictatorship, anatomy, class, institutional power, the terrible comedy of official language — but Comemadre also feels uncannily current in its interest in performance, consent, documentation, and the body as a site where science, art, power, and ambition all arrive with clean hands and dirty instruments.

Text Publishing paperback, 2019; first published in Spanish in 2010, first English-language edition 2018. Translated by Heather Cleary. Light handling wear visible; clean, solid reading copy.