Bloat

My fellow Venezuelans, we’re going to swim in black gold. Remember this year: 1999. We’re not just reclaiming our spring, our Thames, our Seine. We’re reclaiming our country.

In an alternate Caracas, the oil fields have dried up, and executives have implemented a new system for oil production: collecting corpses and processing them into necrofuel.

In four interlocking sections that unfold in reverse chronology, Bloat follows the lives of women who live under this exploitative regime. Mercedita grieves the death of her father and resents the intrusion of investigators into her home. Merced, a sex worker living with an oil executive, struggles to retain her agency amid an increasingly restricted life. After Mamé goes missing, a watchman tries to find her while he and his nephew participate in the paramilitary that enabled her disappearance. And Mercy battles an illness while working at a restaurant frequented by the powerful.

Raquel Abend’s first book translated into English explores totalitarianism in a country with two major exports: oil and pageant queens. In visceral prose that foregrounds the bleakness of its dystopia, Bloat makes tangible the grief, ecological devastation, and violence faced by women in a city where bodies are primarily a means to an economic end. And yet, these women resist their dehumanization, forging community and owning their desires despite the darkness of their world.