Word: roseroã
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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 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...
...Rosero??s choice of name for his protagonist puts us in mind of another famous first-person narrator and survivor of catastrophe: Herman Melville’s Ishmael, who lives to tell the tale in “Moby Dick.” Melville’s epilogue is taken from the book of Job: “And I 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...
...Armies” begins with an epigraph from Moliere: “N’y a-t-il 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...
| 1 |