The book “Evilities: a history of Medellín” was written by author Santiago Gómez and published in July 2023.
Photo: Private Archive
Evils is a book that needs a certain reader. A reader with time, a patient reader. Its author pays close attention to Nietzsche when he said that literature needs “empty” readers, ruminants. This is a book that must be read, and perhaps reread, to be attentive to its convolutions, many of them experimental in nature.
The length of the book is due to Santiago Andrés Gómez’s desire to follow a literary tradition that is not only Colombian or Latin American, but universal, that of long books, which are, above all, experiences of language. It could be said that, in our literary context, it is a work that is closely linked to others such as Celia se pudre, by Héctor Rojas Herazo, or Hojas en el patio, by Darío Ruiz Gómez, in the sense that they are novels that They are based on a risky treatment of language.
Maldades is also the daughter of José Lezama Lima, and in its pages tribute is paid, in some way, to Paradiso. And there are also nods to Conversation in the Cathedral by Vargas Llosa, a book equally essential for the literary training of Santiago Gómez. His novel is, therefore, related to those novels of the Latin American boom in which the writing experiment prevails.
I don’t know if Maldades is an anachronistic book, since it is published at a time when these books are hardly written, published, or read. Today’s readers are more interested in the audiovisual formats of narrative and are trapped by the virtual world of social networks. But since I learned to read and write by reading novels similar to these, I did not feel strange before Maldades. I was not expelled in any way. On the contrary, I connected with what these narrators tell.
And what do they say in Evils? They tell the story of a Medellín crossed by evil. The main narrator of the novel is a paranoid character. And the embrace between this paranoia and Medellín is perhaps the most suggestive contour of the book. Santiago Gómez assumes that vertigo city from a troubled and delirious feeling of persecution. That bad city that has sold its soul to the devil on several occasions – to the devil of drug trafficking, to the devil of paramilitarism, to the devil of the neoliberal economy – is what appears in these pages.
Maldades is a hurt criticism of Medellín. From this perspective, it fits very well into that Antioquia literary tradition – started by Tomás Carrasquilla, taken up by Fernando González and followed by Fernando Vallejo – which, through its diverse narrators, incessantly lambasts a city that hates and loves itself. at the same time.
This criticism, which has the outlines of the demolition, is made through Julián, the alter ego of its author, who has emotional ties with three women. There are actually four stories in the novel. On the one hand, that of Julián, a man who makes a controversial documentary in his city and fails in his effort to denounce the corruption of the official press. A conservative and manipulative press associated with business and political groups of dark power. On the other hand, the stories of the three women –Verónica, Isáfora and Alzbieta– who are as emotionally unbalanced as Julián, and who tell us about his problems, with a tragic balance of consequences that border on fantastic and science fiction literature. .
Maldades is also a novel with many intertexts, not only literary, but also cinematographic. In fact, in some passages the reader witnesses the splendor and decadence of a certain cinephile sensibility of Medellín, permeated by psychedelia and sordidity and shaken by urban violence. In this sense, there is no shortage of long reflections on literature and cinema. Reflections that, at times, are overwhelming and difficult to follow. Because, as I have said, we are faced with a novel that is as rich as it is demanding.
Such is the arduous challenge that Maldades poses. But if the reader identifies with the delirium, paranoia and pain of his narrators, faced with a degraded Medellín, he will have a profound experience that is difficult to forget.
