ORNAMENTAL, Colombian author's chilling dystopia from eleven years ago, published in pandemic times

ORNAMENTAL
JUAN CÁRDENAS (tr. Lizzie Davis)
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.95 any edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The lives of a doctor, his wife, and his patient collide, laying bare the political and personal narratives they have carefully constructed for themselves.

A scientist recruits volunteers for the trial of a new recreational drug that exclusively affects women. Among them is “number 4,” who becomes emotionally involved with first the scientist, then his wife, a well-known visual artist in the midst of a creative crisis. The scientist is oblivious to the atrocities his new drug will bring to the city; his wife is oblivious to the superfluousness of the objects she committed her life to exhibiting in galleries and museums. Number 4’s presence pierces the couple’s complacency, gradually undoing the many certainties they’ve accumulated in their lives of ease.

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My Review: Somebody has a poor opinion of medical professionals and the industry they perpetuate: "Today they finally brought in the participants: four middle-aged women whose unremarkable medical histories show no record of addiction or criminal activity. The only peculiarity is that they all had children at a fairly young age, but that’s not unusual for women from the inferior classes." says the PoV doctor in the journal where he recounts his clinical trials of what is, effectively, soma. It's really a shame the world has moved on from Huxley's Brave New World, because it explains so very much of the 2020s is rooted in the feared and despised efforts of utopians to bring peace and order through conformity. Enforced by drugs.

A story about a medical researcher who wants to make women more docile by granting them euphoric indifference to the mundane world. A drug that, once administered, has the user in its thrall ever afterward, and of course the administrators are men.

Does any of this sound familiar, Huxley readers? Does anything about this social agenda...subjugating women by hooking them on a dream of happiness that's been standardized...sound politically motivated and as though it might be in progress? The reason this book, published in 2020, made no ripples feels likely to be that pesky pandemic we have all memory-holed, that kind of ate all the attention the world had at that moment. Because it was spot-on and prophetic.

No one has a name in the narrator's journals, only functional labels. Logical empiricism writ interpersonal. It's a way of universalizing those involved in the action, showing them not to be characters with inner lives but mere function-servers in the narrator's mind. We;re in his journals, his are the only thoughts we're vouchsafed, so he has no need to pretend he has a scintilla of interest in them as monads only as they serve his purposes.

Purposes are, in his view, those actions that leave traces; he wants to leave a trace. His view of the function-servers as not being characters is forcefully ridiculed by "Number 4"'s insistence that you can't have a city without a name, there can't be a city occupied by function-servers but people who need and want and create, as well as manufacture and consume. Her use of the doctor's drug does not so blunt her edges that even the doctor's wife, a maker of frivolous brummagem ornaments, is struck by "Number 4"'s perceptions of creation. She becomes closer to "Number 4" on her artistic and creative level, appearing to head into a real assessment...can't call it a reassessment because there is no indication of any such thing ever having taken place before...of the purpose of making the gauds she makes.

And then "Number 4" goes away and the doctor and his wife submerge in the soma-like miasma of their dystopia, resuming their pointlessness and indifference.

Exactly as I see around me, function-servers failing to connect dots in persistent patterns. I found it disheartening but very very well-made. Sentences lure we-the-reader on and on into the buildings that have no meaning and form no city.

Don't go into this tale expecting there to be an ending. More an evocation of The End, and one I'm still chilled to the marrow while looking at the diorama of the author's story made by a manic fifth-grader without perspective.

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.

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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.