10/14/2025
A great review of Tomás Downey’s Diving Board (translated by Sarah Moses) at Asymptote.
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In “Astronauts,” one of the nineteen stories in Tomás Downey’s Diving Board, a man floats to the ceiling and stays there. Why? “Chance is capable of anything,” the narrator concedes. “The universe lacks a will—it just exists, occurs.” Characters across the collection are self-proclaimed skeptics—suspicious of friends and family, their own inclinations, and most strongly, when faced with the inexplicable. In the Argentine writer’s hands, such individuals are a way of exploring the possibilities of universal chance or malice. Facing apparitions or aliens or human urges toward the unforgivable, they try to grasp at the logic of their worlds—and fail.
“It was a question of equilibrium,” the narrator of “Variables” thinks, justifying the increasing, startling neglect of her child as she works from home postpartum. Balance was as simple as “removing something from one side and putting it on the other.” In “Alejo,” a teen steals a scalpel during a lesson on frog dissection to harm a female classmate. Only later, covered in blood, does he realize: “Between desire and action there should’ve been a step, one he had skipped. He’d followed a different logic and that made everything seem more unreal.”
Logic, whether between the members of nuclear families or partners in perfect couples, becomes twisted and distorted in Downey’s dire chronicles. Stories are quick glimpses of lives, their characters cut off before consequences have the chance to set in. I felt my pulse race while reading the final lines of “A Love Story,” about a couple’s weekend trip to a remote cabin where the running water doesn’t work; my stomach sank with each paragraph of “The Place Where Birds Die,” about how a new baby alters a family summer at the beach.
Tomás Downey has mastered the chill in the air, the prickling at the back of your neck; in Moses’s translation, colloquial and keen, these stories could be told by your neighbor or cousin. Recurring instances of the surreal—disappearances, repetitions, the supernatural and unexplained—heighten the characters’ more routine circumstances and recalibrate the way they see the world. Here, the gore, rot, and dread are tools for examining how we deal with the real horrors in our lives. As the narrator of “The Men Go to War” offers in the stead of seeking relief in tragedy’s wake: “Better to hold on to the raw pain that’s perpetual but bearable, like a child who’s sick and in need of constant care.”
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