How I killed my father, by Sara Jaramillo

Start reading from the morbid, pull the title as a macabre headline of some remote newspaper that collected the ominous cases on the wild side of reality. At the end, a touch to attract attention amid the thunderous noise. Because reading is that haven of peace or madness, but always away from background noise.

You, reader, the book, and the dead father. There is no more, without cheating or cardboard or trompe l'oeil possible once launched to guess in the plot what really happened to those father hugs lost forever.

Immediately the tragedy is diverted to new channels. No daughter killed her father, beyond self-induction to guilt. That guilt capable of launching you to consider that you could have done something wrong, that some other movement on your part could have changed such an unfortunate destiny. That of the fluttering of the butterfly capable of awakening a hurricane. Only the flapping now is what remains as the whisper of the lost voice.

With that tinge of crude realism that the Colombian also regularly addresses Laura Restrepo, Sara Jaramillo leads us to life after death, to silence as absence, to home as melancholy, to day to day as survival of grief.

The exercise of novelizing the tragedy can be approached from very different levels. If it is your own tragedy and you do a sincere exercise in purging your feelings, sometimes you vomit and others cry, faced with the desolation of a truth that is as painful as it is true and unacceptable by nature.

When I was eleven years old, a hitman killed my father. I was a girl who did not imagine that something like this could happen. But it happened. I still find it hard to believe that barely thirty-five grams of steel and one gram of gunpowder could have killed a family.

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