The gray hour by Eduardo Otálora when we have the information. Fund of Economic Culture. 112 pages.
We often hear — and read — that in literature something important happens when an author creates a world. “A narrative universe of its own” is the common phrase, and this refers to a literary work in which the verisimilitude is such that the reader comes to seriously consider that, what he reads and knows that it is fiction, could be true . Or that it could at least have happened somewhere. Or that it could happen.
To achieve such a world of one’s own is indeed a triumph.
Now, for it to happen, several things must happen. First, the creation of a stage. That is to say, a geography that although it is imaginary has its physical, environmental and climatic laws – the didactic example that serves us all is Macondo, a place where it rains for months without pause and we believe it. And also, of course, you have to invent some characters to stage a drama for the reader, which in the long run is what literature is all about.
There is more: a language. How these characters speak and express themselves; how they name things, what words they use, what they call each other. And what actions do they do. Maybe there are more variables, but let’s stick with these. The fact is that if all of the above is well done we will swallow the hook and, to use another phrase common to books, we will be “hooked.”
On The gray hour it happens as is. For more grace, the author not only creates – and recreates – one world but three, since the novel is made up of a trilogy of long chapters, apparently unrelated because they take place in different geographies and with dissimilar characters, but that in the end the reader discovers that they are the before, during and after of the total story. What is which? World’s End.
In the first part, a mass of black clouds unleashes something very similar to a pandemic – beware: the novel was written before 2020 – that forces people to try to find refuge in a mysterious tower, where the second story takes place – how many years later? A century? Three thousand years? – in which an unrecognizable humanity experiences a cruel, dystopian, bloody and humiliating social order. The third chapter is the agony of the last remnant of what was once humans and their world. Total degradation.
The gray hour I think, it would fit into the genre of science fiction to which authors are so rarely thrown in Colombia, and that would be another merit. And although the awards are not a guarantee of anything – at most that someone liked it – this book won the 2019 City of Bogotá National Novel Prize.
Scrap for Readers: ‘The big machine smells awful. In addition, very little air enters for all of us who are crammed there. Where it is my turn it is very narrow, he barely managed to raise his head to take a little air each time the good-man on which I sit stands up. Around I have I don’t know how many good-males and good-females moving around, each one doing his own thing. It is impossible to count ourselves in this mess ».
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Humboldt’s notesby Daniel Montoya. Frailejón Editores (without pagination)
This volume of poetry was one of the most notable novelties at the last Medellín Book Festival. It has all the nice things that a publishing house like Frailejón has accustomed us to, which publishes very careful books in editorial terms —binding, layout, paper, typography—. The content, of course, is also beautiful and well worked. It corresponds to a poetic compilation with which the author, who is Colombian, recently won the Juan Ramón Jiménez prize for poetry in Spain.
These are poems in free verse that, it might be suggested, are tied to a common theme which is the observation and exaltation of nature. As is usually expected of a book like this, inside there is lyrical and music, and taste in composition.
Scrap for readers:
« The golden silk spider
The egg has been broken
and the spider that curdles the silk in its belly
that will build a palace of thread
that will clothe all the nations of the world
the spider that will turn its prey into a mummy
and a sarcophagus: he’s cold »
– – .
