Río Muerto
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
By one of Colombia's most renowned novelists and reminiscent of Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Río Muerto by Ricardo Silva Romero tackles the topic of paramilitarism and violence in Colombia when a father of two sons is killed a few steps from his home.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Colombian writer Silva Romero makes his English-language debut with a wrenching tale of murder and survival. Near the remote Colombian town of Belen del Chami, a mute man named Salomon Palacios is gunned down by hooded assassins in 1992. His distraught widow, Hipolita, sets off on a rambling odyssey of retribution, accompanied by their sons Max, 12, and Segundo, eight. Salomon, meanwhile, has become a ghost, and he meets with the ghosts of other victims of political violence. Romero captures the intensity of the family's grief, as they're poorly consoled by a gravedigger and are ignored by the police, all while Salomon shadows them, unable to intervene. Silva Romero seamlessly weaves lyrical depictions of Salomon's afterlife, a "dense, black, clammy, stinking jungle that looked to him like hell," with pointed observations of the country's decades-long guerrilla war, which "continues to break the extraordinary open hearts of thousands of Colombians." Meadowcroft's crystalline translation introduces readers to an important Latin American voice.
