The Invisible Years

“It’s impossible to get a single answer from the past. It’s not a key to anything. It’s just a place we go to trick ourselves.”

Andrea and Julián haven’t seen one another in twenty-one years—not since the tragic, fateful night their senior year of high school that marked their group of friends forever. A startling phone call brings the two together again in Houston, where they begin to unravel the truth of that year, picking open long scabbed-over wounds from their upper-class adolescence in 1990s Bolivia and the scandal that ripped them apart.

A writer unhappy in his career and his marriage, Julián has been novelizing the past for his next book, trying to make meaning out of the events that changed the course of their lives forever. “I’d thought that writing about that time would free me, relieve the burden of the invisible years,” he writes, “but often it seems that it’s done the reverse.” Juxtaposing the naïve invincibility of adolescence with the grasping uncertainties of adulthood, The Invisible Years deftly weaves a coming-of-age tale that leaves the reader hanging on every word, even as they know how the cards fall in the end.

Rodrigo Hasbún is a Bolivian writer and screenwriter. He is the author of eight works of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel Affections (Simon & Schuster), which received an English PEN Award and has been translated into twelve languages. Named one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists in 2010, Hasbún’s short stories have appeared in Granta, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. He lives and works in Houston.

Lily Meyer is a translator, a critic, and the author of the novels The End of Romance and Short War. She is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso's Little Bird and Ice for Martians, Abraham Jimenez Enoa's The Hidden Island, and Clara Usón's The Shy Assassin.