New Review of The Armies by Evelio Rosero

There's a new issue of The Critical Flame up, a publication that, in my opinion, has put up some great content in its first four issues. It's a publication that very much places quality over quantity, which is nice, since on the Web it's usually the other way around.

This issue includes my review of The Armies by Evelio Rosero, which won The Independent's Foreign Fiction award and which deals with the 40-year war in Columbia.

My review is decidedly mixed, although it's the kind of mixed review I like to write--one where I was definitely taken enough by the book's good parts to want to work out what exactly it didn't work for me. Often I like these reviews much more than the outright pan (which frequently doesn't tell you anything new or of lasting value) and the positive review (which can run afoul of faint praise or just plain cluelessness). Anyway, here's a graf to entice you:

The book starts promisingly with a vision far removed from war: the septuagenarian Ismael is standing in a ladder and peering above his wall, eying the exposed nipples of his young Brazilian neighbor as she sits ravishing and naked with her guitar-strumming husband. Barely have we begun to assimilate this strange scene than we find ourselves within the Brazilians’ kitchen, where the 12-year-old maid Gracielita stands washing dishes as Eusebito, their son, peeps at her and is “fascinated and tormented by [her] tender white panties, slipping up through generous check.” This scene of mutual ogling could be taken in any number of directions—significantly, though, Rosero ends the scene with the information that Gracielita only became a maid after being orphaned “when our town was last attacked by whichever army it was.”

In the following pages, Rosero is deft in elaborating the nuances of the lecherous relationship . . .