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The Armies (2009)

by Evelio Rosero(Favorite Author)

3.9 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0811218643 (ISBN13: 9780811218641)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

New Directions

review 1: Searing. I felt a little winded while reading this; right around the moment I realised there was't going to be a happy ending because this is what actually happens to people. This is REAL. One day, life is mundane and you're bickering with your loved one about something so trivial as to be exasperatingly dull; the next, everything is somehow ripped away from you and your life becomes a void and you don't know why or what happened. All you have is hope, but that gets made thinner with every gunshot, every encounter with the men with guns. You don't know who they are or what they're fighting for, and it doesn't even matter. There isn't going to be a happy ending. That's really all there is to it.
review 2: It is always interesting to read Colombian authors who of... more necessity follow in the footsteps of Garcia Marquez. Rosero shows himself to be of significant stature in his own right in this short novel about the interminable civil wars which Colombians endure. From the viewpoint of an old man, he interweaves the feelings of old age - especially those of a continuing if unquenched and unquenchable sexual desire - with an old man's growing awareness of the imminence of war and of disaster. His awareness grows slowly, more slowly than those of his neighbours, and throughout he clings to the notion that his wife - who has become one of the disappeared - will return. Through the old man's eyes Rosero paints an affecting and convincing picture of how war and inhuman behaviour affect ordinary people and overturns their lives, and how they try and fail to deal with the incomprehensible. less

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