Colombia

[sufi]

I got given this at the weekend, really enjoyed it

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This interesting piece about translating the book into Spanish, https://latinamericanliteraturetoda...lucky-ones-julianne-pachico-camilo-jaramillo/ makes me want to search up some reviews of the spanish version and see what they thought of it in Colombia

her latest book is about a child being brought up in the jungle by an ai, sounds fun

 

[sufi]

has anyone not read gabriel garcia marquez? &/or anyone read anyone else from colombia?

 

[Benny Bunter]

Love in the time of cholera, and the few short stories I've read by him are great.

Also the non-fiction The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time

I read about half of 100 years of solitude when I was younger but keeping track of all the millions of characters tired me out and I gave up. Might revisit it one day though. The magic realism thing can get a bit cloying but he was obviously a genius.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Haven't read any other Colombians apart from Marquez, but I've enjoyed these from the Latin Boom era.

Cortázar - loads of short stories, especially La Casa Tomada

Vargas Llosa - The Cubs, his first book, a very twisted novella. Haven't tried his big novels.

Jose Donoso - The Obscene Bird of Night, possibly the most weird and disturbing novel I've ever read

Juan Rulfo - Pedro Páramo (a ghostly short novel) and The Burning Plain (short stories). He was Mexican so only loosely associated with the Boom but definitely worth a read. Obsessed with death and suffering in a very Mexican way.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I don't keep up with contemporary lit at all, but Argentinian fantastic/horror fiction has gone through a trendy phase in the last decade. Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enríquez (both translated into English by the same woman who did the Roberto Bolaño stuff) are both well worth checking out.

Can't help you with Colombia though, I'm afraid. Maybe it will go through a trendy phase too if it isn't already.

 

[wg-]

100 years of solitude really is an amazing book but you need to be in the right mood for it. Once it gets going I'm not sure there's much like it.

He left the country & is now a Mexican citizen but Fernando Vallejo- Lady of the Assassins was really good from memory.

I have a book of stories by Tomas Carrasquilla that are really great but never read any of the novels, not sure how many got translated.

*

Could never get into Cortazar, re the above posts, just didn't vibe with it, though i do have a very nice hardback anthology that sits looking good on one of the bookcases

 

[shakahislop]

I wouldn't say that it's one of my favourite Oasis song, but it's familiar because it's in between a lot of the good ones. I do agree though sufi probably this board has reached the stage where we should have one thread for every song, at least for the first two albums

 

[sufi]

@shakahislop is the only person on this board to have actually visited colombia but he probably wont admit it

 

[shakahislop]

@shakahislop is the only person on this board to have actually visited colombia but he probably wont admit it

i've been there twice

 

[shakahislop]

it's really good, unsurprisingly

 

[version]

 

[shakahislop]

i would say that it's one of those places that i've been but didn't comprehend. i spend maybe a month there total, went quite a few places, la providencia this tiny little island, san andres, the cities on the northern coast, carnival in barranqulla, getting hammered in little shops in cartegena, tayrona, old colonial town popayan, walking up and down hills in cali, boring bogata in the andes. it felt huge and complicated. the people in the mountains were so totally different to the people on the coast. and it's a long way between the two. i feel like i understood nothing, couldn't get my head around it. a certain sophistication there and a certain dirt and squalor. i saw a french dude astonishing local children in a village by using his phone to make a toy light up and make a noise when they touched it. they looked like they'd never seen anything like it before. like they were watching a wizard

 

[shakahislop]

in providencia the people look and speak like jamaicans. relaxed guys hanging out with the foreigners on the beach. some girls i knew walked by us and said hello, as they walked away the colombian dude said: there go two angels. but somehow it sounded like poetry not sleaze.

 

[shakahislop]

in Cartagena we were in a hostel and we got absolutely baked walking on the walls of the city. the old part of the city had been american tourstified. at night we went out and sitting in cheap restuarants the owners tried to sell us coke. we demurred but in the end we got some sitting on the street on plastic benches. it was everywhere. it found us like wasps on sugar, it was everywhere. we got drunker and drunker drinking beers in place after place until they closed. we drank on plastic tables and chairs in cornershops.

 

[shakahislop]

at night in bogota there was no streetlights. people were in the square setting off flares after a football match. it felty scary. there was a certain lawlessness to it, walking past. you felt intimidated. a sitting duck.

 

[sufi]

at night in bogota there was no streetlights. people were in the square setting off flares after a football match. it felty scary. there was a certain lawlessness to it, walking past. you felt intimidated. a sitting duck.

pachica says something about colombia is like the lover you feel guilty about

 

[shakahislop]

in tayrona i was dehydrated after walking through the jungle to the beach and i was getting ecstatic. it felt like the most beautiful place i'd been. it felt like a dreamscape. i was really dehydrated. we fucked up and got lost on the way back and had to up the pace as it got dark, we were scared of stepping on snakes

 

[shakahislop]

the second time i was there we were drinking so much. there were strong sugary cocktails so cheap they were basically free. we were always sitting on the street in the heat. it was death drinking. obliterating everything. sitting on a manky portside in santa marta trying to talk. i was in the middle of paying a ransom (long and sad story), that's what we were avoiding

 

[shakahislop]

in the hostel in santa marta there was a very sick European in one of the bunks. he had so far as i can see had some kind of feathers surgically implanted into his arm, like wings

 

[shakahislop]

i met a russian israeli in that hostel and for some reason we went out with him. that was the first time i saw the russian information sphere in action. he had all the lines, all the words. he was repeating what he'd read on the internet. that was in 2016, i wasn't used to it then. he had firm, strong, well put opinions on things that he knew absolutely nothing about. he wouldn't listen at all. he was really annoying and just as it was getting fraught, that was when my friend decided to bring up the calming subject of gaza