Word: novels
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...reality of Cal’s reflective intransigence. The novel’s historical reflections are interspersed with fragments of Cal’s search for emotional connection, and his flight from that connection into anonymity and loneliness. These passages manifest Cal as the tragic center of the novel. “If this story is written only for myself, then so be it. But it doesn’t feel that way. I feel you out there, reader. This is the only kind of intimacy I’m comfortable with. Just the two of us, here...
...heat.” Muted violence is doubly frightening; harder to confront, yet perversely easier to live with, it becomes an atmosphere, lurid and inert. It’s this atmosphere that permeates “The Armies,” Columbian writer Evelio Rosero’s latest novel. Like the best literary treatments of trauma, “The Armies” utters its violence quietly, with the clear-eyed intensity of a fever dream...
...first of Rosero’s works to be translated into English, “The Armies” was the recipient of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize earlier this year. This short, sharp novel recounts a few days in the 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...
...sympathy as readers. Is our identification with the suffering of others unconditional or, in fact, contingent upon the goodness of the sufferer? “The Armies” has no clear answer, but it hints at a radical skepticism that sits uneasily with our expectations of a novel that bears witness to the suffering of innocents...
...come to realize, however, that these prurient meditations represent more than the lecherous fantasies of an old man. Early in the novel, Ismael recalls the dire circumstances in which he and his wife first met; in the bus station of a nearby town they both witnessed the shooting of a man by an eleven year-old boy. Rushing nauseated to the lavatory, Ismael walked in on his future wife sitting on the toilet and was instantly transfixed: “… her eyes like lighthouse beams over the hitched up island, the join of her legs, the triangle...