Marina Closs Writes Through the End of a World

By Andy — 2026-08-17 — Literary News

I picked up Marina Closs's *The Depopulation* expecting one kind of historical novel. What arrived was something stranger.

The book begins in the Guayrá region, a 17th-century Jesuit mission in the subtropical wilderness—a place that sounds, at first, like a redemption narrative waiting to happen. Priests. Indigenous converts. The spreading of faith. Except Closs doesn't let you sit in that comfort very long.

She was born in Misiones province, Argentina, the landscape where all this actually occurred. That matters. Her childhood wasn't academic distance from the Jesuits' "civilizing mission"—it was geography. The earth beneath her. Publishers Weekly notes that Closs uses dry humor to highlight the absurdity of the Jesuits' civilizing mission, and that's a kind of writing that only works when you've grown up in the aftermath of something.

The novel is almost biblical in rhythm but laced with something else entirely—something almost comic and genuinely unsettling at once. Father Antonio Ruiz sits in the middle of his mission like a man locked in permanent vision. When a messenger asks him about sending birds to the governor, Ruiz writes back that the birds cannot be caged. He offers the Holy Spirit instead. This is the book's real note: that kind of gentle, impossible refusal.

What I wasn't prepared for: The arrival of Overá, who announces himself as the Son of God and younger brother of Jesus, disrupts the mission's harmony, and then European marauders and slave hunters actually show up. The novel doesn't hand you a climax. It hands you a collapse.

Thomas Bunstead's translation holds all of this without translating it away. He's done serious work with Spanish-language writers before—Vila-Matas, Gainza, others—and here the prose stays restrained even when the situation spirals. That's not accident. That's craft.

The novel doesn't resolve itself as a redemption or a tragedy in the comfortable sense. It's a meditation on instability. Closs built a book where nothing stays fixed—not faith, not community, not even your sense of what kind of novel you're reading. It's her first novel published in English, and it already suggests a writer with no interest in making things easier.

If you want neat historical fiction, keep moving. If you want something that actually troubles the ground it walks on, this one's here.