The 3 best books of Santiago Gamboa

Delving into the work of Santiago Gamboa always offers a sociological vision of the first order. The point is that Gamboa is fictional, of course, but that unexpected essay background is intelligently provided to us through characters, ways of seeing the social context, descriptions sprinkled with that subjective notion of the author, capable of dosing them from something so formal like metaphor or something as substantial as irony.

From a Colombia that marks to be a writer by the still recent and extensive shadow of Gabo, Santiago looks at many other anonymous Colombians capable of heroism in essence: survival. Gamboa reaches us with accurate portraits and vivid plots. Rescuing stories from the inexhaustible mosaic of large cities, Santiago Gamboa closes the focus to the point of almost distressing.

That on many occasions the subject points to that noir so close to the present is not so strange, it is the writer's awareness of his time. Only, as he would say, any resemblance to reality is mere coincidence, because we continue to think that the world may not be as violent as crime novel authors paint it. And perhaps live like this in a healing naivety.

Top 3 recommended novels by Santiago Gamboa

Colombian Psycho

In an unexpected find, human bones are discovered in the mountains of La Calera, east of Bogotá. Prosecutor Edilson Jutsiñamuy will have the mission of finding his owner, hand in hand with agent Laiseca and the rest of his team. Julieta Lezama, her journalist friend, will join the investigation to unravel a chain of heinous crimes that will lead her to meet the writer Santiago Gamboa and his work, in which she will find a fundamental key to understanding the mystery. .

Jutsiñamuy and Lezama return in Colombian Psycho with a dizzying story and a fascinating plot of mirrors between reality and fiction, but also between the author's own representations, who risks his life in this disturbing x-ray of the Colombian national situation.

Colombian Psycho

The Ulysses syndrome

If it weren't for the fact that the Colombian-style noir genre pulls me in a lot, without a doubt this novel would be at the top of this podium. Because it composes a necessary scenario towards empathy. Doom today is more attached to alienation and rootlessness. The equality of opportunities is a chimera and the integration a utopia burnt all the boats towards it.

Its dizzying pace, the sympathy aroused by its protagonists, and the simple and complex truths it reveals have made The Ulysses Syndrome one of the most widely read and beloved novels of the last decade.

Like so many characters in reality and fiction, the protagonist of The Ulysses Syndrome is in Paris to become a writer. But this is not the great capital full of splendor and refinement, but the Parisian underworld, where the destinies of hundreds of immigrants crossed, beset by necessity, loneliness and the stigma of their status as foreigners.

In this dark version of the City of Light, livelihood opportunities are thrown into overdrive, as if sex, alcohol and drugs were the escape from misery.

The Ulysses syndrome

the night will be long

A child witnesses a brutal confrontation on a lost highway in the department of Cauca. No one in the nearest town claims to have heard anything, but an anonymous report of the incident reaches the hands of the prosecutor Jutsiñamuy, in Bogotá.

In the company of two endearing heroines, the journalist Julieta Lezama and her assistant Johana, a former FARC guerrilla, the prosecutor will embark on a dangerous investigation that, although it points to suspects of all kinds, will end up finding unexpected culprits, as dangerous as the plus.

The night will be long is a vertiginous story sprinkled with remarkable moments of humor and pain; a novel that discovers the inequality and violence that do not give truce in Colombia.

the night will be long
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