The Cracks We Bear, a raw, spare novel sparked by new motherhood, marks a joint English-language debut for Chilean author/publisher Catalina Infante Beovic and translator Michelle Mirabella, who previously translated Infante Beovic's short stories.
Laura birthed Antonia with "animalistic screams." What Laura wanted most to have during the delivery was her mother Esther's Santa Teresa medal, which Esther would "always put on when she was afraid to face things." But the medal is lost, and Esther long dead. "You don't just miss a mother who dies; it's another emotion, difficult to name," Laura muses. Without her own mother, Laura's journey into parenthood feels like a dark enigma. Antonia overwhelms Laura: "I can't do this... I don't want to be a mom." Laura was just 18 when Esther died, their relationship complicated and painful in life.
As Laura embraces Antonia, she realizes, about Esther, that "trying to understand who you were, what we were" will always be intertwined with her own experience of motherhood. Laura's "therapist says relationships are full of cracks, that they're... these ordinary earthen jugs that have been pieced back together over and over again." Infante Beovic illuminates these cracks with longing and loneliness, exhaustion and first smiles. Her sharp insights are revelatory, reframing an "irrefutable," joyful photograph as evidence that mother and daughter face a coming rift.
Mirabella's translator's note adds her own transformative experience with The Cracks We Bear, which she first read in 2022 "as a daughter" and finished translating as a mother, having since had her own daughter. With empathic perception, author and translator present a nuanced, haunting journey of new (and old) motherhood. --Terry Hong