The current plethora of Colombian writers is one of the most profuse and recognized in the Spanish language. The issue could be linked to the worldwide success of a Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez to serve as an incentive for new generations of storytellers. But in the end, writing is more a matter of spontaneous appearance, of temporary coincidences between restless souls wanting to tell stories.
And so we find renewed and renewing pens that pass through the hands of William Ospina, Fernando Vallejo placeholder image, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, George Franco o Laura Restrepo. Until you also reach a Mario Mendoza focused on his particular urban narrative that results in a canvas that mixes the city and its souls.
Specifically Bogotá and its people as the main narrative background from whose location and composition ends up arriving at the port of the humanistic, the sociological and even the anthropological that good novels transmit with the creative endeavor of an author like Mendoza.
But it is not that Mendoza is a writer focused on that realism made almost a chronicle of a place and a time. In the end Bogotá is almost always the stage only adapted to the genre that plays. Because in the variability is the taste and even more ingenuity. Black novels, mysteries, adventures with a background. Mendoza is a bit of everything and everything good.
Top 3 recommended novels by Mario Mendoza
Satan
Without a doubt Campo ElÃas Delgado would suffer from Thousand-yard stare, that gaze of a thousand meters, the one that crosses the real world to reach the dark space where his real gaze was lost. There among the red of the blood of combat, dazzled by the flashes of the guns on fire and terrified by the sight of the dead everywhere.
As sinister as it is literarily plausible to enter human abysses, or rather dehumanized. No one called Campo ElÃas Delgado in the Vietnam War and no one should have told him about how to use his weapon already far from the front. But precisely that lost gaze is always accompanied by the voice that leads to madness.
The question is in this novel to change the focus, to trace the paths before and after the disaster. The consequences of the worst of the coincidences that lead us to the advancement of our vital sentence with everything without closing.
A beautiful and naive woman who skillfully robs top executives, a painter inhabited by mysterious forces, and a priest who faces a case of demonic possession in La Candelaria.
Stories that, as I say, are woven around that of Campo ElÃas, a war hero, who begins his particular descent into hell obsessed by the duality between good and evil, between Jekyll and Hyde, and will become an angel exterminator.
Akelarre
With the starring role of Frank Molina, who until then had been more of an important resource in his plots, the author presented us with one of his most elaborate novels.
Many other authors combine "afternoons of glory" of their investigators or fetish policemen with dark moments, composing different plots loaded behind the back of the protagonist on duty. Mendoza has wanted to give the controls of his own novel to Frank Molina in the worst of his moments. A bad father-writer who meets a bad son-character wayward with his narrative destiny.
Frank Molina, drunk, pot and psychiatric patient, is caught up in his past with a collection account when the police call him for advice on some strange murders that took place in the Santa Fe neighborhood.
A Jack the Ripper impersonator is immersed in a veritable blood orgy and kills prostitutes without contemplation. As Molina follows clues from one end of the capital to the other to find the criminal, his steps intersect with those of his mentor, a priest tormented by the secrets he hides from his youth. And at the bottom of this Gothic painting of the contemporary city, a young painter discovers that she is not an artist, but a sorceress who treasures ancestral powers.
End of the world diary
One of those metaliterary novels in its most essential notion of the writer's motives, of his nature dedicated to transmitting a vision of the world that others will later adopt in their imaginary, remaking everything magically.
Writer Mario Mendoza receives a message from an old college friend: Daniel Klein. Between the two they will evoke an impetuous youth in which they shared the love of the same woman: Carmen Andreu. Carmen's unusual life, her drug addiction, her stay in a religious sect, her nomadism as a photographer of desert landscapes, her secret jobs as a model for porn movies, will be very difficult for both Daniel and Mario to assimilate.
At some point in the narrative, Daniel asks Mario to help him follow in the footsteps of his father, a German who has lived camouflaged in Bogotá trying not to attract attention. The investigations will lead them both to a sinister and infernal past: torture, genocide, religious rituals of transferring energy levels, macabre experiments in the midst of war.
Finally, detective Frank Molina, who comes from novels such as Lady Masacre and La melancolÃa de los feos, will find, after following him for several days through the center of Bogotá, in a hidden alley, this kind of perverse and criminal vampire. Some apocalyptic notes in a notebook close this novel that aims to decipher our time and anticipate the fearsome time that lies ahead.
Other recommended books by Mario Mendoza…
shipwreck log
We lived in the chronicle of a death foretold and here is the log of the shipwreck. Only for survivors of one last day...
Like the children who followed the Pied Piper of Hamelin, humanity walked with joyful indifference towards disaster, convinced that its excesses and advances were proof of evolution and development, until the pandemic emerged that turned the entire world upside down. Overnight everything slowed down or stopped, time was distorted and many had the feeling of being trapped in a nightmare loop. Mario Mendoza lucidly anticipated this disaster in several of his novels such as Lady Massacre, Diary of the End of the World, Akelarre and Chrononauts and in the stories of The Book of Revelations.
Now, in Logbook of the shipwreck, he witnesses from his confinement the strange days we live and invites us "to accept this disaster coldly, without hope, but also without drama, and let's take some notes while we sink". Loneliness, emptiness, horror and the tragicomic flashes of humanity in the midst of the pandemic that is devastating the world.
Without a doubt one of the best books read this 2021 is collection of blood, excellent !!!
Thank you very much for your comment, Klaudia!