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...disjunctions in time and distance serve to highlight the similarities of each generation and their plight. As Cal recounts fleeing his past and his family for San Francisco, he states “A ship didn’t carry me across the ocean; instead, a series of cars conveyed me across a continent. I was becoming a new person, too, just like Lefty and Desdemona, and I didn’t know what would happen to me in this new world to which I’d come.” Cal’s sexual transformation...
...uncertainty that reigns in San José is perhaps similar to tranquility, but it is not the same; people go home early… then doors close and San José agonizes in the 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...
...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 made clear—are kidnapped...
...story. Its title—in Spanish, “Los Ejercitos”—refers to all three “sides” of the conflict that blights rural Colombia: the military, the paramilitaries, and the guerrillas. In the violence that comes to engulf San José, it is impossible—and, perhaps, pointless—to distinguish between them. Ismael remembers the recent attack on the local church, “by whichever army it was, whether the paramilitaries or guerrillas.” The combatants are “slow silent figures, which...
...only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Like Job, Rosero’s Ismael has no part in the processes governing the destruction of his life but is forced to take up the challenge to his faith. When the other inhabitants of San José flee in trucks, Ismael refuses to leave, choosing instead to honor the promise he and Otilia made during the last attack: “Neither Otilia nor I had any hesitation: we were never leaving here...