These disgusting discoveries have a twin resonance, both as suspenseful foreshadowing and as an unconscious buckling of the imagination to the discomfort in turning a personal history into a cultural token. develops a fungal infection of the foot in the persistent humidity and filth of the island, which eventually keeps him bedridden for two weeks. finds that the grassy pastureland he’d hoped to use to raise cattle is more of a swamp, and a handful of cows he bought with the estate have died from infection before their arrival.Įlena takes to swimming and sunbathing in a beautiful cove that turns out to be on a heavily trafficked footpath to the island’s main village, making her subject to the frequent and lurid gawking from local men, which forces her to build a fence around the beach and claim it as private property, thus deepening tension with the villagers. The waters in Turbo are oily and stagnant, leaving green slime on the wharf posts while feeding a worm colony that eats away at the wood. González fills the landscape with a rot and decay that undermine any attempt at rural escapism. These moments of foreboding create a forensic sensitivity to detail, fixating on where the chain of events that led to J.’s death began, looking for a moment when a warning signal might have been recognized or some point of no return avoided. found faintly disgusting - while outside the waves thundered.” Another early chapter closes with an attempt at salt-curing some fish, which ends in an overbearing stench and the fish thrown out. reads poetry by candlelight as “moths darted through the flame - something J. Later, settling into their new life on the island, J. “It ain’t my fault, seño,” says one of the local men hired to carry the sewing machine of J.’s partner, Elena, in the grimy port town of Turbo, after carelessly dropping it. Written with an omniscient brutality, the book is composed of 38 short chapters, each of which ends with what feels like an expository blow, 38 ticks of a tourniquet tightening around a limb that will at some point be severed. Written as a coping mechanism for grief, In the Beginning Was the Sea presents itself as a novel, hiding a confessional gut-spilling within the rhythm and structure of fiction, satisfying the impulse of self-reflection while skirting its vulgar indulgences. Though more than 30 years old, González’s story of failed bohemian idealism has new power in its conscious merging of fiction and confessional in a time of nauseating uncertainty about the purpose of the memoir in all its unheeled forms. In the years since, González has become one of the most celebrated living Colombian writers, though his work has only recently been available in English, starting with In the Beginning Was the Sea’s UK release last year, and followed by an American release this year. And so In the Beginning Was the Sea opens with the image of his brother on the bus beside his lover, embarking on what he thinks is a rebirth, but which ends up killing him.įirst published in the early 1980s by the owner of the Bogotá nightclub where González worked as a bartender, In the Beginning Was the Sea was eventually reviewed in local newspapers and released by a commercial publisher. I could see his last days.” The event devastated González, and the desire to write about it became “a question of life or death.” After considering the idea of telling Juan’s life story, González decided it would be best to recount only the end. You see the night table, the books - I could see my brother. “You can see what happened in every detail. “It was terrible,” González recalled in an interview with The Guardian. You.įifteen days after his brother was killed, Tomás González traveled to a small island off the Colombian coast to go through his belongings.
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