Ants on the tongue
by Lena Yau
Ants on the tonguea: a novel about immigration, gastronomy and rebirths
Lena Yau, who has dedicated herself to building bridges between literature, immigration and gastronomy, presents a new edition of her 2015 work, a story that breaks the limits of pleasure to explore wounds and escapes
The renowned writer Lena Yau republishes it with the Baile del Sol publishing house, Ants on the tongue, after the success obtained in 2015, the year of the first edition.
Starting from a Venezuela that ceased to exist when the childhood of Picho Chica, daughter of European immigrants, ended; of Jordi, a descendant of Catalan Jordi, and the native and determined Douglis, the story of this novel revolves around the desires, restrictions, desires and realities of these diverse characters who are united by fine threads.
«I translate everything from the table: speech, thinking, interpersonal relationships, behaviors, reactions, habits, power, fashions, ideologies, the human condition. There is pleasure, yes, and the right to exercise it,” Lena Yau has said about her work, “but also the relationship with the mother and father, the traumas, the compulsions, the philias and phobias, the perversions, the feelings, rootedness, foreignness, sex, life, death. The table, in its wooden silence, entails everything.
Ants on the tongue It is a novel that addresses the food universe from a different perspective than that which had been worked on until now. It is a work far from daydreaming, idealization, the traditional magic of the kitchen, the eroticism of cooking; but associated with orality and the pathologies inherent to ingestion, always treated with humor and hyperbole.
From a literary point of view it is a discovery. Lena Yau, who in her work has dedicated herself to building bridges between gastronomy and literature, has written a novel that breaks the limits of pleasure to explore wounds, escapes and rebirths. Now more than ever Ants on the tongue has great relevance.
Reviews
● “Ants on the tongue manages to sustain constant stylistic challenges without refraining, therefore, not only from telling, but from constructing credible characters of undeniable psychological thickness, which places Lena Today in a restricted group of Latin American narrators.” Miguel Gomes (literary critic, writer)
● “Lena Yau get with Ants on the tongue recover the miracle of what novel writing means in its essence: mutation, break, perplexity, enchantment (…)
Lena Yau “He gives us a brilliant, original, unforgettable novel.”
Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez (writer)
● “Ants on the tongue attest: Spanish does not exist. That is why it is not written in Spanish but in Spanish: the joy of its varieties – singing and singing! – fit here.” Corina Michelena (writer)
About the author
Lena Yau (Caracas, 1968).
Daughter of Spanish immigrants, father from Palma and mother from Tenerife. She has aerial roots. She is a mix of people from Caracas, Madrid and Lanzarote. She currently lives in Madrid.
Author suspended on a seesaw and on a balcony, elongated, swinging between geographies and always looking towards the horizon. These distances encompass her imagination, define her and define her writing.
Narrator, poet, journalist and researcher. She is a specialist in the link between literature and intake. She has a degree in Literature and a Master’s degree in Social Communication from the Andrés Bello Catholic University.
Source: https://algunoslibrosbuenos.com/hormigas-en-la-lengua
