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🇦🇷 Argentina /Culture & Society

The mystery of suicidal birds and a family’s grief: Ernesto Carrión’s new novel

From Clarín · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

In-depth Named sources Context piece
  • Ecuadorian writer Ernesto Carrión’s novel “Catálogo de aves muertas” follows Leónidas and his son Lautaro on a journey to the Andes after the unexpected death of Leónidas’s wife, Elisa.
  • Elisa, a biologist studying migratory cuviví birds that plunge into Ecuador’s Ozogoche Lakes each September, dies in an apparently deliberate car crash before completing her research.
  • The novel links the family’s journey and mourning with the still-unexplained mass deaths of the birds.

Ernesto Carrión’s new novel begins with a departure from the city, but its journey is as much inward as it is geographical. In “Catálogo de aves muertas,” grief and travel overlap as a father and son head toward the Ecuadorian Andes, carrying a loss they cannot explain.

The father, Leónidas, travels with his son Lautaro to camp in the mountains near Sangay National Park, in Chimborazo province. They arrive in the days before the annual mass death of the cuviví birds, migratory birds that plunge into the cold waters of the Ozogoche Lakes, at an altitude of 3,500 meters. Other visitors are drawn to the same remote landscape.

The roads, even if they are not new, even if we have traveled them in the past, appear to us in another light and with possibility.

· Ernesto CarriónThe opening ideas of the novel frame travel as a changed experience after loss.

Leónidas describes his bereaved household as “a new family of only two members.” The absence of Elisa remains present through the ordinary objects and smells she left behind, including her unusual vegetables, running shoes, white deodorant, black tea and almond milk.

A new family of only two members.

· LeónidasThe protagonist describes his household after the death of his wife, Elisa.

Elisa had earned a doctorate at 28 and worked as a prominent biologist for a foreign company. She loved nature down to its smallest creatures and had begun studying the cuviví phenomenon, which science still cannot explain. “It is a frenzied ritual of nature that has no explanation,” the novel says, describing birds that seem to arrive with the sole purpose of crashing into the lake.

Months before she planned to observe the event, Elisa died after apparently deliberately crashing her car. Investigators found no sign of a mechanical failure. Her research remained unfinished, like the unanswered question surrounding her death. Carrión completed the novel during a 2024 residency at MALBA in Buenos Aires. It is the first novel by an Ecuadorian published by Anagrama, and its account of Leónidas’s journey presents mourning as a road that offers no easy understanding.

It is a frenzied ritual of nature that has no explanation.

· Narrative voice in the novelThe passage describes the unexplained mass deaths of the cuviví birds.
About this summary

Originally published by Clarín in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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