THE VIOLENCE: My Family's Colombian War, debut memoir/political history

THE VIOLENCE: My Family's Colombian War
ADRIANA E. RAMÍREZ
Scribner (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five (no perfect fives for the descendant of vandals!)

The Publisher Says: A powerful chronicle of Colombia’s descent into decades of civil war through the lens of an intimate, multi-generational tale of upheaval and betrayal.

When presumed president-elect Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, champion of the working class and harbinger of a new era of progressive social change, is assassinated on the eve of Colombia’s 1948 presidential election, the capital is plunged into bloodshed. So begins a singularly brutal period of Colombia’s history known simply as la violencia—a bloody civil war that spawned decades of turmoil and splintered the country into ever-shifting factions.

The Violence is an intimate history of this conflict—told not from the political center of the war but from the mountainous finca that Adriana E. Ramírez’s family tended to for generations, and through the eyes of her formidable grandmother, Esther. With startling lyricism, Ramírez illuminates the specter of violence—from guerilla warfare to the brutalities found so often in romantic relationships to the spontaneous and senseless violence steeped into everyday Colombian life during this period—and the threat that it poses to a country, and a family, that is trying to stay whole. Gracefully braiding together macrohistory, family history, and personal narrative, Adriana E. Ramírez traces these parallel stories of upheaval in a sweeping portrait of a country and family in flux.

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My Review: First, read this:

A Colombian aphorism says that to understand tomorrow, you need to make sense of yesterday. Like a long line of dominoes, one moment in time topples another, which topples another, until soon nothing stands.

Nothing stands when nothing is anchored, tied down, held in place. Change feels like chaos to those who like the status quo, and no one human likes chaos. Even the ones who cause it do so to achieve a goal, then they try to impose an order they like better than the one they destroyed.

Author Ramírez, whose father-in-law I proudly claim friendship with, tells the violent, chaotic story of the Colombian civil war of (more or less) 1948 to 1954 using the lens of her own family's participation (avoidance is also participation) in the events of the time. It is a dark, terrible one, this story; no one comes out of civil war without a smudge on their personal or familial reputation. I refer to an act of heinous vandalism on the corpus of History that Author Ramírez's family perpetrated...my inner historian was so wounded by it I was forced to lie down for an hour with a cool compress over my eyes. Murder, rape, torture...well, that's war isn't it...but burning records?!? *shudder* Unforgivable.

Fortunately my forgiveness is neither requested nor required. The family survived, the deeds done made the existence of this book possible. Its publication today, the fourteenth of April 2026, launches a writing career into a new literary orbit. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has, until now, been Author Ramírez's writing home so this memoir of history and family is her mark on the book-reading world. It is a story only she could tell, told with clarity and a great deal of honesty. If I'd discovered my family had burned records I would not admit it out loud, still less commit it to the permanent record of publishing it! Kudos for bravery, and may the Terminators of the history department that clearly must exist in some weird corner of spacetime choose not to expunge the bloodline.

I think I fell asleep watching a movie....

What made this a good read for me was the voice Author Ramírez chose to convey this blend of history and family memoir in. It is a book-length chat with a good raconteuse, a lovely, long chat after dinnner with an interesting friend. It is, as mentioned, dark of subject but not grim or gross of recounting. I do not think anyone's expectations of an involving, emotionally resonant read will be disappointed. I'm very glad I was introduced to the political complexities surrounding La Violencia in such a personal way. Reading about politicians and diplomats and US imperialism is definitely something I enjoy doing; I prefer to approach history with a flexible set of expectations, however, so seek out what more intimate and reflective storytelling I can find to enliven the public facts.

Author Ramírez has received warm reviews in multiple venues, most excitingly to me Time Magazine with its many millions of readers. The praise early readers like Idra Novey and Angie Cruz is praise she earned by careful and attentive wordsmithing. I've known since I began reading her journalism several years ago that Author Ramírez was both talented and skilled at the craft of writing. I am excited for us, the commmunity of readers, that she is also able and confident enough to listen to the muses' whispered inspiration and then to give us deep life-giving drafts of storytelling water.

DIFFICULT LIGHT, blindness is more than physical, more than emotional...existential

DIFFICULT LIGHT
TOMÁS GONZÁLEZ (tr. Andrea Rosenberg)
Archipelago Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Grappling with his son’s death, the painter David explores his grief through art and writing, etching out the rippled landscape of his loss.

Over twenty years after his son’s death, nearly blind and unable to paint, David turns to writing to examine the deep shades of his loss. Despite his acute pain, or perhaps because of it, David observes beauty in the ordinary: in the resemblance of a woman to Egyptian portraits, in the horseshoe crabs that wash up on Coney Island, in the foam gathering behind a ferry propeller; in these moments, González reveals the world through a painter’s eyes. From one of Colombia’s greatest contemporary novelists, Difficult Light is a daring meditation on grief, written in candid, arresting prose.

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

My Review: Waiting to die. Needing to die. Suffering that no one in a god-run universe should be required to bear. Taking one's power back from an uncaring (or cruel) Providence and giving the order to extinguish suffering and life both. It is what David is doing; it is what Jacobo, his son, did.

In summer at a certain point you have the illusion that the days last forever. I didn't want night to come, because then I'd have to acknowledge that time was passing; that life was passing us over, crushing us with its wheels and gears. But only light, ever elusive, is eternal. And the light on the water beside the churning propeller of the boat, however much I studied it and reworked it, I was unable to find a way to capture it completely – that light that contains shadows, that contains death, and is so contained within them."

David, a painter now going blind, is in his last days, revisiting in his mind the horrifying moment his severely injured, agonized son's assisted suicide is finally released from his torment.

It was a horrible thing to read; it is there from literal page-one introduction to the story. The amount of torment in reading a book about the death of your young-adult child, one capable of making this decision for himself legally (in Colombia, anyway), was terrible. After five years I can come tell you I think the writing as translated by Andrea Rosenberg is lovely, spare and evocative; the story involving; but in the end, what I felt was the overwhelming grief and outrage at the cruelty of life.

Catharsis? Yes, but in a curious way, no...how cathartic is death on a storybook's page, really? For me it's more the intensity of a father looking at blindness, death, and the awful unanswered question "why?" directly for the last time. There are moments of squick, as David is a bog-standard boomer man misogyny and all; his wife tells some jokes that clang in twenty-first century ears; there are unpleasant ethnic humor moments.

Granting those facts their weight, your decision about reading the book is better guided by your ability to be in the headspace of a man who can't quite ever feel at peace with a world so vicious as to take his child and leave him behind to mourn.

Right there with you, my dude.

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 (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook editions, available tomorrow

FINALIST for the 2026 PEN Translation Prize! Winner announced 31 March 2026.

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.

THE SOUND OF THINGS FALLING, a rough-tongued honey-voiced lesson for complacent US people

THE SOUND OF THINGS FALLING
JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ (tr. Anne McLean)
Riverhead Books
$8.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the city of Bogotá, Antonio Yammara reads an article about a hippo that had escaped from a derelict zoo once owned by legendary Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The article transports Antonio back to when the war between Escobar’s Medellín cartel and government forces played out violently in Colombia’s streets and in the skies above.

Back then, Antonio witnessed a friend’s murder, an event that haunts him still. As he investigates, he discovers the many ways in which his own life and his friend’s family have been shaped by his country’s recent violent past. His journey leads him all the way back to the 1960s and a world on the brink of change: a time before narco-trafficking trapped a whole generation in a living nightmare.

Vásquez is “one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature,” according to Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, and The Sound of Things Falling is his most personal, most contemporary novel to date, a masterpiece that takes his writing—and will take his literary star—even higher.

I read What We Talk About When We Talk About Magical Realism by Fernando Sdrigotti in the LARB, and it reminded me of this terrific read.

My Review: To every rule its exception: This book is praised highly by a writer whose work I abhor, Jonathan Franzen; and ordinarily that means I will avoid the book so as not to read even a Pearl-Rule 46pp of something I'm bound to hate.

Ha ha ha, rules. I liked this book a lot. Well, "like" is a weird word for the emotional resonance of the book. I responded to the book like a tuning fork responds to a smack.

The fact is that I am a fan of Latin American literature because, like this book and author, most of the translated works are political and tendentious in their natures, and so are the authors. So am I. So it's usually a good fit.

This story, which feels as personal as the blurb suggests it actually is, made me very uncomfortable, as I watched Colombia's descent into warlord rule and civil failure. I suspect I'd feel the same fearful anger if I were to visit Montana or Idaho or Wyoming, places that white supremacist/apocalyptic christian cultists have claimed for themselves. When nutball extremists take over a place, it's a failure of civil authority, and that is a crime. The net effect is the same as the drug cartels' takeover of Colombia in the 1970s or the current failure of civil authority in Mexico today or the Cascadian separatist movement here.

These are not positive developments, they have tremendous costs in personal misery, and they are much to be deplored. Vásquez does his deploring by focusing tightly on the emotional and psychic costs of civil failure to a small group of friends, Antonio's friends and his good self. It's a sad, sad chronicle of horror and rage. And it's wrapped in beautiful words expressing solidly grounded truths:

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next.

Translator McLean has done a marvelous job of making poetry in the English, and while I haven't read the original Spanish text, I can only say that she is unlikely to have made such handsome bricks without good, abundant straw.

If I must pick a nit, and I must, it's that the structure of the novel is a tad more complex than is strictly speaking necessary to tell the author's very involving story. It's not hard to follow, but it's just artificial enough to pop the reader out of the narrative flow. That's almost never a good thing. (Okay, it's never a good thing, but I've learned not to make absolute statements because some little twidgee or another will come along and say something tiresome about my opinions and frankly I'm over it.)

I hope, that issue aside, that you will all race out to your local bookeries and procure copies of this book. It's got something important to say to us in the USA about the incredibly high cost of allowing dissent to become dissolution. Colombia failed its citizens, and their agony only slowly passes. Mexico is mid-failure, and is much closer to us. And yet we allow our own idiot rebels a far freer hand in obstructing and undermining our governmental institutions and shredding our social fabric in the name of some illusory "right" they assert that they have to do this to us all.

Read the book. Learn the cost. The price of the right wing's version of freedom is too goddamned high, and Vásquez knows it first hand. Please listen to him.