Una ucronía encarnada: Nación vacuna, de Fernanda García Lao

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of the novel Nación Vacuna, which appeared in 2017 in Argentina and in February 2020 in Spain, as uchronia, given that it is a fiction that reimagines the future by turning to the past, specifically the so-called War of the Malvinas, which occurred in 1982, when the United Kingdom and Argentina clashed over the sovereignty of the islands of the same name. The author of the book, Fernanda García Lao, was born in Mendoza but has lived constantly jumping between her native Argentina and Spain. That is why, in the first part [Foreignness in Writing], some features of García Lao's literature are determined as the embodiment of her condition as a displaced writer, such as her use of metaphor, irony and the disregard for the rigid prescriptions of genres. In turn, the second, more extensive part [sections 2 to 4], focuses on the book and outlines three axes of analysis: first, the way in which it updates the uchronia; secondly, the choice of the narrative voice that imposes a certain perspective on what is narrated, as well as limited access to information; and, thirdly, the centrality of the body that is, also that of the textual corpus and the maxim that moves García Lao's writing: exploration, which gives such genuine vitality to her texts.