The first novel by the Peruvian writer Claudia Ulloa, the new book by the Bogota writer Juan Álvarez and a diary written by the poet Eduardo Cote Lamus in 1958 are part of the recommended books by Isabel Calderón Reyes.
Diary of Alto San Juan and Atrato
Author: Eduardo Cote Lamus
Economic Culture Fund, 2023
Observe a living being. In being, see everything: its context, the space it produces, the shortcomings that surround it. Describe without condescension, but with sensitivity, a concern that does not exhaust itself. How do others live? This is how the poet Eduardo Cote Lamus wrote this diary, who traveled through Chocó in 1958, as a member of a commission of the House of Representatives.
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All journal entries are from the month of September, but the metaphors, examples, and details in each section are those that an expert would offer. Texts that look like prose poems and feel like fruits of patience, thought up by someone who had time to observe and talk, to learn words, customs and stories. It is not an idealized or generic vision of rivers; In fact, the personalities of each one—from Atrato, from San Juan—are different and each one travels at their own pace.
Yes, a river can be a snake’s skin, with the beauty of textures and shadows that the image invokes, but the narrator also reminds us that snakes bite children.
Find it at Lerner Bookstore.
Get your name back
Author: Juan Álvarez
Alfaguara, 2024
The prison yard was, first, an imagined space. Since before Juan Álvarez had to go through the nightmare of seeing his father persecuted by the Prosecutor’s Office, misinterpreted and sent to preventive detention (based on erroneous judicial police reports), the writer had been thinking precisely in that space: the jail.
At that time, she was trying to write a non-fiction book about the femicide of her schoolmate and insisted on writing as a way of holding on to what is not understood. Something remained of that initial project in Recover Your Name. The other thing, what is not that something, is a testimony of the nightmare that did not let him rest, not only in the sense of not sleeping but of devouring information without respite. Imagining a space had been the first intuition: then we had to visit it, almost inhabit it, and that was how the space became a time.
In one of the scenes at the end, the father thanks his sons for protecting his name. We readers close the book thanking Juan for having transformed his “minor suffering” into this essay about our culture of judgment.
They find it at the Casa Tomada Bookstore
I killed a dog in ROMANIA
Author: Claudia Ulloa Donoso
Laguna Books, 2023
Neither the characters nor the reader know what kind of journey this will be. What does this Latin American want to do in Romania? Why is she there? What interests her? She tells us that she lives in Norway, that she teaches Norwegian to foreigners and that in one of the classes she teaches she met a Romanian who she later became friends with. In addition to inviting her on a trip to her country, the former student has inspired her to draw and has worried about her, about her depression, her pills, and her way of taking them. In one of the first scenes of her trip, the only words she knows how to say in Romanian come out of her mouth: dragostea dintei, from the song that became popular in the 2000s.
The emphasis on the fact that almost nothing is understood because the language is not mastered—just as the spirit is not mastered—allows a clairvoyance to understand other facets of the experience of being alive. That, and the apparent dissolution in the narrative, is carefully planned by Ulloa Donoso, who intersperses the teacher’s voice with that of the Romanian in a precise way to produce the anxiety that the characters feel.
He finds it in Tornamesa.
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