El síndrome de Ulises
Bogotá: Editorial Planeta Colombiana, Biblioteca Breve, 2005. first edition. Paperback. 353p., wrps. Near Fine in Wraps. Item #24824
ISBN: 9584211900
They are lives illuminated by the intensity of their misfortunes, by the colorful memory of valleys and hills that they have never left behind. They are savagely young in everything, in their anxiety over love and lost country, in the voracity with which the bottles of wine and vodka run out and the simplicity and compassion with which they give themselves to sex. Pure and miserable, their stories are brutal and beautiful as in a Russian story. In this novel a young writer who squeezes dishes in the dungeons of an oriental restaurant summons the voices of his friends and his numerous women, in a dizzying testimony of African, Oriental, Latin and also French languages and skins. Few times a work of fiction has touched with so much drama and beauty the world of the immigrants. The syndrome of Ulises, as it is called to the sorrows that are incubated in the ghettos and slums where the illegal foreigners are crowded, is one more novel close to the precarious and precarious Paris of Henry Miller and to a devastating novel by Eduardo Caballero Calderón, El buen salvaje (Nadal Prize, 1965), to the festive and springtime Hemingway or Fitzgerald, or to the harsh and bohemian Latin American artists.
Price: $35.00