RÍO MUERTO, 2025's first all-five read, though not for the fantasy-averse reader

RÍO MUERTO
RICARDO SILVA ROMERO (tr. Victor Meadowcroft)
World Editions
$14.99 ebook editions, available tomorrow

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: On the outskirts of Belén del Chamí, a town that has yet to appear on any map of Colombia, the mute Salomón Palacios is murdered a few steps away from his home. His widow, the courageous and foul-mouthed Hipólita Arenas, completely loses her sanity and confronts the paramilitaries and local politicians, challenging them to also kill her and her two fatherless sons. Yet as Hipólita faces her husband’s murderers on her desperate journey, she finds an unexpected calling to stay alive.

This poetic and hypnotizing novel, told from the perspective of Salomón’s ghost, denounces the brutal killings of innocent citizens and at the same time celebrates the invisible: imagination, memories, hope, and the connection to afterlife.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: South America's cultural impact is never more delightfully represented, to me at least, than when I read magical-realist works whether in translation or not. A novel narrated by a ghost definitely counts as "magical" in my book (!), so I was prepared for something to get me, to find the chinks in my emotional armor.

Not prepared enough.

That there's a civil war, a narcoterror regime, and immense unrest in Colombia was known to me. How pervasive it was didn't seem to me to be a reason to be surprised until I read the author's explanation that these events are fictionalized, not merely fiction...that "based on a true story" line we see so often hit home hard, because this is a friend's life skinned in fiction but boned by facts.

It's really down to this:

I am telling what I was told to me: that Salomón Palacios was gunned down only a few paces from his home and died and became a nameless thing in the gloom—the closing in—before returning from the dead. That he took an eternity in coming back, for the soul recovers memory in its own time, at its own rhythm, but that he must be out there now, and always will be, because death is the true present and because some murder victims do not depart.

Time passes subjectively, per Einstein; I'm not entirely ready to say velocity's the one governing factor until someone can really explain time fully. Maybe Death really does equal time; after reading this book, I have to be open to the possibility. For one of the few times in my reading life I find myself agreeing with a Pentecostal character: the apocalypse really has begun.

What makes Salomón such a great narrator is his ongoing physiological voicelessness. In life, in death, he makes no auditory impact. His existence as a ghost is in a powerfully evocative way a continuation of his voiceless, ineffectual life. Small gestures of kindness, his eking of a living by doing odd jobs, his very death carry the same burden of being a little guy living a little life that couldn't possibly threaten anyone who gets killed in spite of his death changing nothing.

Well, it unhinges his wife. She goes on a campaign to force his killers to kill her, and their sons, too. The sons have other ideas. Her plan to confront the boss who ordered Salomón's death to force him to martyr her, and her boys, in order to...what, exactly? no one in their town doubts who caused the thugs who did it to pull the triggers...or is she simply and selfishly out to commit suicide to avoid feeling grief for her genuinely loved with all his flaws husband? Insisting the sons she birthed join her in this spectacular suicide-by-provocation motivates Salomón in ghostly form to attempt to communicate love felt, love given to be received, to the maddened Hipólita to cause her to reinvest in life, to use her rage to pick up her boys and get the hell out of there. It would give his death, and his life, meaning.

How can a man voiceless in embodied life, in other words, find a voice now he's bodiless?

Author Silva Romero wrote a story I did not want to inhabit, but I did inhabit as fully as I have most stories I've read, because few kinds of story command my involvement more than grief, love, and power dynamics in emulsion. He chose a story I couldn't not get myself into. He chose a storytelling voice I could not avoid investing my empathy, sympathy, and tearducts into. Salomón loved deeply and mutely showed his love in practical simple deeds; he loved so much he was motivated to reach around the barrier of death. Author Silva Romero, ably served by his translator Victor Meadowcroft, did a fine job evoking a violent time's hideous human cost, as well as human beings' overpowering need to force the world to make those costs make sense.

It's impossible to do that, I say confidently, as I read the story of how it is done. All five stars.