Fernando vallejo
Luis Fernando Vallejo Rendón (Medellín, October 24, 1942) is a Mexican writer, biologist, thinker and filmmaker of Colombian origin.
His works develop social issues of Colombia, his country of origin, such as drug trafficking and hit men, as well as taboo topics for society such as homosexuality, pedophilia, etc.
His two masterpieces are the novels La Virgen de los Sicarios and El Desbarrancadero.
Biography
Fernando Vallejo is one of the seven children of former senator, former Minister of Development, former president of Antioquia's conservative board of directors, former Secretary of Government and conservative lawyer Aníbal Vallejo Álvarez. The future writer grew up in Medellín, his hometown.
A fan of classical music, he liked to play the works of Mozart, Chopin, Gluck and Richard Strauss on the piano. After a year of studies at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, he graduated in Biology at the Javeriana University. He traveled to Europe and studied cinematography in Italy, at the Cinecittá Experimental School. On February 25, 1972, he moved to Mexico City, where he has produced all of his work and where he lived with his partner, the Mexican set designer David Antón, until his death in 2018, the year in which he moved to Medellín with his dog Brusca, thus culminating his 47-year exile in Mexico.
He is a vegan and is distinguished by his activism in defense of animal rights, for being critical of the Catholic Church, the way of doing politics in Colombia, false morals, physics, formalisms. He is a staunch opponent of former President Álvaro Uribe, He is openly homosexual, atheist and due to his anti-natalist views, he has no children.
Nationality
In April 2007, he obtained Mexican nationality and on May 8 of the same year he renounced his Colombian nationality. A statement of his published by Caracol Radio the same day of his resignation went around the world and caused mixed reactions in almost all the Colombian media.
Renouncing his original citizenship, Fernando Vallejo said in a statement signed in Mexico on May 6, 2007 that "that bad country of Colombia" is no longer his and that he did not want "to hear from it again. What remains of my life I want to live in Mexico and here I plan to die."
As a child I discovered that Colombia was a murderous country, the most killer of all. Then I realized that it was an outrageous and petty country, and now—with the re-election of Alvaro Uribe—I found out it was an idiot country, and there I requested my nationalization in Mexico, which I was given last week.
Five months later, in October 2007, he stated that he would begin the procedures to recover his Colombian citizenship. As Vallejo later explained, the resignation of his nationality was motivated by the lawsuit that a group of civilians filed against him and Daniel Samper Ospina ―then director of SoHo magazine― after having written an article that plaintiffs considered an insult to the Catholic religion. In the first instance, a judge had decided that Samper and Vallejo should go to jail, so the novelist decided to start the procedures to obtain Mexican nationality, because he considered the sentence an infamy and did not intend to submit to it. The decision was appealed by SoHo and a year later the matter was resolved, but the process to obtain Mexican citizenship ―which requires signing a document by which he renounces his previous nationality― had continued. its course. In 2009, Vallejo had expressed his idea of wanting to return to Colombia to live, regardless of what might happen to him. However, until the first half of 2011, he was still not legally recognized as a Colombian. That year, after it was announced that he had won the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages, Vallejo declared: "Let's say that I am Colombian and Mexican, because I am from where I was born and where I am going to die."
In 2009, in an interview for El Espectador, he expressed his feeling of wanting to die in Medellín: «I aspire to die in Colombia, in the house where I was born, a house on Calle del Peru in the Boston neighborhood".
Literary career
Vallejo has been known worldwide for his novels, but ―in addition to nine of them (five of which make up an autobiographical cycle)―, he has published three books of essays, a grammar of literary language, two biographies of poets of his country (José Asunción Silva and Porfirio Barba Jacob) and one by the Colombian philologist Rufino José Cuervo. His activity as a director and cinematographer, prior to all his literary work, left behind three films, two with a Colombian theme, but produced in Mexico.
The five books of his autobiography entitled The River of Time are: Los días azules (1985), which reflects various episodes of the author's childhood on the scenes of his grandparents' farm (Santa Anita) and the traditional Boston neighborhood of Medellín; El fuego secreto (1987), where he explores as a teenager the paths of drugs and homosexuality in Medellín and Bogotá; The roads to Rome (1988) and Years of indulgence (1989) narrate his experiences in Europe, especially in the Italian capital, and in New York; Entre fantasmas (1993) includes the years in which he has resided in Mexico City, where he lived between 1971 and 2018.
Vallejo is the author of the biography of the Antioquian poet Porfirio Barba Jacob. Entitled El mensajero (1987), it is the product of more than ten years of constant and rigorous research throughout Colombia, Central America, and Mexico.
In 1994, he published a novel outside his biographical cycle, La Virgen de los sicarios, about the violence of drug trafficking in Medellín. It was made into a film by Barbet Schroeder and received mixed reviews.
With El desbarrancadero he won the Rómulo Gallegos award, one of the most prestigious in the Spanish language, in 2003. Amid autobiographical allusions and with the unheard-of force of stark language, Vallejo describes in In this work, the illness and death of his brother Darío, presenting reflections on the topics of illness (AIDS specifically), the family crisis, daily violence and the Catholic Church as a social evil.
In La rambla parallele (2002) a walking corpse circulates hallucinatingly through a Barcelona suffocated by the heat and that in the voice of the narrator is confused with Medellín and Mexico, through a prose full of fury and nostalgia, where past, present and future merge into one.
My brother the mayor (2004) ―a novel inspired by the figure of his brother Carlos, mayor of the municipality of Támesis, in Antioquia―, ironically but playfully describes South American electoral rituals: unrealizable promises, bought votes, ghost voters and compadrazgos. After fighting tooth and nail with his innate honesty, the protagonist is elected mayor and his management, saturated with economic and judicial problems, results in great progress for the city.
As a filmmaker, he wrote and directed two films in Mexico about violence in Colombia: Crónica roja (1977) and En la tormenta (1980). A third film, La rout (1984), co-written with Kado Kostzer, marked his last work as a director.
In 1985 Procultura published its edition of the Complete Poetry of Porfirio Barba-Jacob. Ten years later he publishes the result of his extensive research after the memory of one of the great Colombian poets: José Asunción Silva; This biography, called Almas en pena, chapolas negras, describes the financial embezzlement of the poet and reflects the Bogota environment at the end of the 19th century. With this work he renews the genre.
Most of his novels are set in Colombia and his recurring themes are violence, homosexuality, adolescence, drugs, death and the defense of animals.
Vallejo has also cultivated essays: in 1983, the Fondo de Cultura Económica published in Mexico Logoi: a grammar of literary language, an ambitious research project on literary writing, in which important points original and critical views on language, its use and its limits; in The Darwinian Tautology (1998) he tries to refute the Darwinian theory of selection and adaptation as causes of evolution, which he accepts but having as its exclusive cause the modifications that can randomly occur in DNA at the molecular level, without intervention or influence of the environment or any external cause.
As a narrator, he offers an insolent, iconoclastic, black and deeply pessimistic vision of the world. His style is rough and vigorous and as a whole represents one of the peaks of the current Colombian narrative. One more essay, the Manualito de imposturología física (2005), offers a discussion, in the form of satire, of the theoretical constructions of physics; In the voice of a scholarly narrator, Vallejo accuses the highest representatives of physics of being imposters with the help of 'imposturology', a science of imposture invented by him. The book has been the subject of specialized criticism.
In 2007 he published La puta de Babilonia, an extensive and prolix historical essay, in which Vallejo criticizes Christianity and the Catholic Church. He has defined the book as a Vatican crime record. In principle it should have been published by Santillana, the publisher of Grupo Prisa, but it asked him to eliminate “anti-Muslim references, for fear of reprisals. He refused and went to Planeta, which published it just as he wrote it.
In 2011 he won the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages awarded by the Guadalajara International Book Fair, for being a writer who expresses «his emotion with the voice of an artist in which the reality of a strange world coincides with the imagination".
Fernando Vallejo highlights the rebellious tradition of the Antioquia intelligentsia, following names like Barba-Jacob and Fernando González. The great love of his life is animals and his only cause is his defense.
Filmography
As director
Awards and recognitions
He has received numerous awards for his works ―including the Rómulo Gallegos and FIL prizes for Literature in Romance Languages―, and two of his novels ―El desbarrancadero and La Virgen de los sicarios― appear in the top 15 places on the list made in 2007 by 81 Spanish-American and Spanish writers and critics with the best 100 books in Spanish of the last 25 years.