A profound work of dark and brutal truth. Though the world of this story is bleak-sometimes almost unbearably so-the narrator’s soliloquies on agency in the midst of captivity and degradation are timeless, haunting, and extremely powerful. Recalling the work of Kafka and de Sade, a nightmarish fable explores timeless questions about violence and subjugation, power and freedom.Rosero packs great depth within a brief novel through brisk chapters that can change tone as the ambivalent narrator wavers among resentment, anger, and defeat. Disturbing and powerful, this one is hard to forget. Throughout, Rosero’s prose, translated with lyricism by McLean, conveys the characters’ horrifying human nature with aplomb (on the clothed: “they arrive sometimes like a fantastic whirlwind, whooping with excitement, and at other times with heads bowed, as if already repenting of the great error they wish to commit”). The Armies is a disturbing allegory of life during wartime, in which little appears to happen while at the same time entire lives and worlds collapse. Moving from offbeat humor to soaring spritual ecstasy, it has both pathos and punch. The translation of Good Offices (2011) is sublime. Rosero affirms unashamedly that literature can and should change social reality… Stranger to the Moon is a brave, powerful, and distinctive novel by a writer who arguably holds the strongest claim to the title of Colombia’s greatest living author. Insects and reptiles are trained as agents and spies against the naked ones, and only the most fortunate humans manage to reach old age by taking up strategic spots near the kitchens and grabbing for the fiercely contested food.
Each subsequent section of the book adds further layers to the ritualistic and bizarre social order inhabited by its characters. A parable of pointed social criticism, with naked humans imprisoned in a house in order to serve the needs of “the vicious clothed ones,” the novel describes what ensues when a single “naked one” privately rebels, risking his own death and that of his fellow prisoners. His magnificent novel Stranger to the Moon portrays a world that seems to exist outside time and place but taps into the dark myths and collective subconscious of his country, with its harrowing inequality and violence. The renowned Colombian writer Evelio Rosero has never been one to shy away from the darker aspects of his nation’s history and society. A fantastical novel about power and subservience by the great Evelio Rosero, winner of Colombia’s National Literature Prize
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