El año de la serpiente

The Year of the Snake is a strange, darkly comic murder novel built out of smells, bodies, loneliness, female fear, bureaucracy, and reptile obsession. It alternates mainly between two storylines: the discovery of the corpse of Celeste Blum, a young architecture student, and the flight of Simón Sanders, the man who loved her and appears to have killed her with a venomous snake.

The novel begins in an apartment building in Buenos Aires. Aldana, a fifty-two-year-old woman who lives in 5B with her old sick dog, notices a horrible smell in the hallway. It is not simply rot, gas, garbage, or dampness, but something layered and almost intelligent. Aldana traces it to apartment 5C, where Celeste Blum lives. Celeste is young, beautiful, solitary, and vaguely known to the neighbours as an architecture student. Aldana rings the bell and knocks, but no one answers. She finds Gina, the building porter, who is downstairs laying rat poison. The two women go up together and confirm that the smell is coming from Celeste’s flat.

In a parallel strand, a man named Simón is on a plane. He is neurotic, afraid of turbulence, judgmental, misogynistic, and obsessively attentive to every detail around him. During the flight he panics, convinced the plane will crash. A woman sitting nearby, Soledad, calms him by explaining turbulence and making him breathe. Simón keeps thinking about Alicia, who is in the hold of the plane. At first the reader might think Alicia is a wife, girlfriend, or pet dog, but after landing it becomes clear: Alicia is a venomous snake, travelling in a special container labelled “live reptile,” “do not tilt,” and “venomous.”