Word: ismaelã
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...life of the narrator Ismael, a retired schoolteacher who lives with his wife in San José, a fictional Colombian town nestled in the highlands and surrounded by coca plantations. In the latest spate of politically-motivated violence, some citizens are murdered while others—probably including Ismael??s wife, though it’s never made clear—are kidnapped. Once content to drink coffee in the plaza and daydream about beautiful young women, Ismael is suddenly stricken by his wife’s disappearance and sets out to look...
...sumptuousness of Ismael??s garden as he describes it—where oranges grow fat and succulent in the blazing sunshine—echoes in his descriptions of the attractive young family living next door. The object of his desire is Geraldina, a wife and mother of two, whom he admires from his vantage point atop a ladder while picking oranges. His wife, Otilia, notes and censures his voyeurism, but Ismael??s desire is compulsive and extends to every young female character we meet. Each is subjected to his scopophilia, described in terms that evoke...
...discomfiting union of sex and mortality is a recurring trope of “The Armies.” So clogged and abortive are Ismael??s desires that his visions of the female form are as morbid as they are irresistible; between every woman’s legs is a “wild darkness,” an “infinity” to which Ismael??s eyes are always drawn. We are reminded of “King Lear,” in which the vagina is, similarly, an entry to an unknowable?...
...point quelque danger a contrefaire le mort?” (“Is there not some danger in refusing death?”). Rosero’s novel offers us an answer: to refuse death is to invite madness in the form of Ismael??s cultish devotion to his missing wife. But it is also to maintain a kind of integrity, to supplant the inevitability of death with the logic of love, by marshalling “all the force and stubbornness of a light in the middle of the fog that men call hope...
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