Laura Restrepo

Laura Restrepo Casabianca (Bogotá, January 1, 1950) is a Colombian writer and journalist, especially known for her novel Delirio, winner of the Alfaguara Prize (2004). and Grinzane Cavour (2006). Her style blurs the boundaries between traditional identities, categories and concepts; in her works she incorporates a mixture of journalism and her own experiences, with high intensity stories that usually take place in her native Colombia. In addition to novels, she has written essays and a children's book. Her works have been translated into various languages.

He has also worked as a journalist and has actively participated in politics. He played an important role in the negotiation process with the guerrillas during the 1980s, which forced him into exile, from which he was able to return only after the April 19 Movement (M-19) was legalized. A left-wing intellectual, he defended the possibilities of Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian revolution^{[citation needed]}, he has condemned the nationalist hatreds orchestrated many times in Bogotá and other times in Caracas and believed in the socialism project of the 21st century.^{[citation required]} He usually lives in Mexico with his partner, who is from that country, but also has a house in Bogotá.

Biography

She wrote her first short story when she was nine years old, and was about "a tragedy about poor peasants," but it took 25 more years before she took seriously what would be her main profession. She writes - he says- to feel closer to his deceased father and also to be closer to other relatives murdered during the most violent period in Colombia. About his childhood, Restrepo recalls: "I had a very happy childhood, in a family nucleus: my father, my mother and my sister. Full of travel, very nomadic, we were always traveling everywhere. My father did not believe in conventional education, so my mother put us in schools and my father took us out. He was always concerned that we read, that we know the museums, the concerts... It was a very free and very happy childhood".

School and youth

Her father, who had to drop out at 13 to work, didn't think schools were generally good; this opinion was reinforced by the fact that his, self-taught, was a writer and mastered 6 languages despite never having attended school. Laura practically did not regularly attend school because her father, a businessman, traveled a lot and took the family to all parts of the world where he went. This lifestyle meant that Laura was never able to complete a year of study at the same school. This is how he attended schools in California —where in Corte Madera he set the record for going to class for only one day, because the next day the family had to travel— and Denmark —there he went to a ceramics school at the age of 10—; In Madrid, the school to which she applied rejected her because she failed the admission test in grammar, mathematics, sewing and embroidery, which were considered basic requirements under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Despite her negative opinion of traditional schools, the Laura's father had a passion for education, which translated into taking his family to museums, ruins, theaters. Upon her return to Colombia, Laura validated her baccalaureate before the Ministry of Education in order to be able to enter the university.

University

Graduated in Philosophy and Letters from the Universidad de los Andes, she later completed a postgraduate degree in Political Science; She was a teacher at the Santa Helena School and, later, a professor of Literature at the Universidad Nacional y del Rosario, but later she focused on the revolution in Colombia.

Politics and journalism

His involvement in politics has taken place in Colombia, in Spain in the Socialist Workers Party, and in Argentina, where he worked with the resistance against the military government. The death of his father had a great influence on Restrepo's life. Her father was very controlling and he didn't like that she was curious about what was happening in the world, for this reason, she decided to go her own way, she claimed to "say goodbye to her father and never see him again." After his death, he became involved in politics, with a special interest in socialism. She was very active in politics and was also part of the activism generation of the 1960s. Her influences were the Cuban Revolution, Camilo Torres Restrepo (a Colombian revolutionary priest), and her college classmates. She felt the pain of seeing poverty, injustice, inequality, and abuses of power that affected the most vulnerable people. He began working in journalism when he returned to Colombia after working in Madrid for three years in the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and later from an era of activism against the military dictatorship in Argentina. The influence of his years of political activism can be seen in his writing. He has also traveled to places considered dangerous for social or political issues. She visited Granada during the events there, and also went to the Nicaragua-Honduras border for a month to write about the war between the Sandinistas and the Contras.

During her years as a journalist, she worked for the magazine Semana (Colombia), and was in charge of writing about national and international politics. This job is where he met Gabriel García Márquez, who was associated with said magazine at the time. He served as a mentor to Laura Restrepo, offering her suggestions on how to write better. In 1983, during the government of Belisario Betancur, he formed part of the Peace, Dialogue and Verification Commission that was supposed to negotiate with the rebel movement M-19. In the course of this process, she found herself in very delicate situations that finally, at the request of the M-19, forced her to emigrate. In an interview she said, "I was very close to the militants and leaders of the M- 19 who were murdered during that peace process. This experience was reflected three years later in his first book, Historia de un entusiasmo. It was one of the first occasions in which social and political agreements were used to reach a mutual agreement with the guerrillas. Restrepo was at the center of social movements and that is when she stopped devoting herself to journalism because she wanted to focus her efforts on peace negotiations. Due to his political activism, he received threats against his life and went into exile for six years. He lived in exile in Mexico —where he collaborated as a columnist in the newspaper La Jornada and in the magazine Proceso i>, always working to achieve peace with the M-19, making trips to Spain, Central America, France to try to reopen a negotiation process. He concluded his work in 1989 when said movement decided to lay down its arms and became a legal opposition party. Laura Restrepo lived in Argentina for several years during the dictatorship.

He began to be a member of Trotskyism when he was at the National University, «a highly politicized place, it was the time of the Cuban revolution, May 1968, the peasant movement in Colombia was almost inescapable and the Latin American boom was closely linked to all these processes of social renewal. According to his account, & # 34; That's where I entered Trotskyism. At first I didn't have much idea, I got involved because one of the leaders was reading In Search of Lost Time and it seemed to me that this was my place. It was not a bad criterion to choose...", she will later recall, with humor, that time. Willing to make the world revolution, her Trotskyist co-religionists sent her, the recently deceased Francisco Franco, to Spain and there she became a secretary General of one of the Casas del Pueblo in the Ciudad Lineal working-class neighborhood.

During the time he lived in Argentina, he was a member of the Socialist Workers Party for some years, supported the fight for human rights and collaborated with the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the relatives of those disappeared by the dictatorship. He spent three years in Buenos Aires and one in Córdoba, where Pedro Saboulard, his son of an Argentine father, was born.

Literary career

Her first story, "a peasant tragedy about the poor, scribbled in a notebook, she wrote at the age of nine; the family assures that his father always knew that one day his daughter would be a novelist. It was his death that inspired her to dedicate herself seriously to the work of a writer that she carries out, as she has explained, largely out of love for her father and for her memory.

The authors who influenced or inspired her the most, Restrepo confesses, were the ones her father liked: the Americans William Saroyan and John Steinbeck and the Greek Nikos Kazantzakis. In Colombia, she began working as a journalist for the magazine Semana in "the national section, and occasionally, international politics". She was sent to Nicaragua and Honduras to report on the war between the Sandinistas and the Contras; Thanks to her work in the magazine, Restrepo met Gabriel García Márquez, who greatly influenced her; he helped her by reading what she had already written and giving her advice.

Style

Laura Restrepo's style is influenced by her involvement in journalism, writing, political activism, and also her work on humanitarianism in Latin America. Restrepo wants to reach a very broad and diverse audience. In this he differs from authors before Restrepo who use ways of writing that often alienate their readers, but Restrepo looks for a way of writing that does not have this effect. Also, in her writing Laura Restrepo likes to use space liminal, speaking of the territorial borders between countries or on an island in the ocean. In many of his novels he deals with the issue of exploitation as a form of social violence. The representation of violence is very graphic and continuous on various occasions. rope to those two great enthusiasms". In addition, what is interesting about Restrepo's style and his mix of fiction is his "interest in investigating current events and his concern for presenting a verifiable historical reference". According to Restrepo, journalism is a form of investigation that "limits you to certain superficial levels" and for her there is a "certain need to go beyond the obvious". So, Restrepo mixes fiction as a form of " the possibility of expanding and complementing what the research itself does not give you" and because everything in a country, according to Restrepo, is hidden, fiction gives that "need to also immerse yourself in those levels of secrecy", therefore, fiction "makes it lawful for you to complement fictitiously a painting that you feel is real, or that points to those slightly deeper realities".

Works

Novels

• The island of passion (1989)
• Leopard in the sun (1993)
• Sweet company (1995)
• The Dark Bride (1999)
• The wandering crowd (2001)
• Pain of invisible roses (2002)
• Delirium (2004)
• Too many heroes (2009)
• Hot south (2012)
• The Divine (2018)
• Song of old lovers (2022)

Stories

• Sin (2016)

Feature

• Colombia, history of a betrayal (1986), reissued as History of an enthusiasm (1995)

Others

• Operation (1988), cowritten testimony with Roberto Bardini and Miguel Bonasso.
• Cows eat spaghetti (1989), poetry for children.

Plots of his novels

Passion Island

La Isla de la Pasión (1989) is notable because it takes place not in her native Colombia, but on a deserted island near Mexico. She focuses her history and culture on Mexico because she was residing there at that particular time, where at first she was not very happy to live but she realized that it was a wonderful country and so she decided to write a new book. The play tells the story about some Mexican soldiers and their families who are on an island and are trying to survive. The main characters in her novel are female figures who are heroes and described as "intelligent and resourceful women." Passion Island is a novel about exile, a love story and the prominence of power as a storyteller. She is also notable for her "new historical" traits such as her self-conscious preoccupation with storytelling between history and fiction. She uses a bibliography in some of her novels to emphasize and verify her facts in her novels. novelas. This work was very successful and recognized in Hispanic countries with its launch and publication, but it had no impact abroad until it was translated into English.

Leopard in the sun

Leopard in the Sun (1993) was produced by Laura Restrepo after eleven years of research. Her book is based on what was happening during this time in her country, drug problems, and much research "of real events", she created this work of art. Her work is a result of a creation that "is a brutal novel that uses very crude language". Feminine women play an important role and serve as "protectors of their husbands and children" in her novel. & # 34; The plot of the novel is physical and psychological violence & # 34; hoping to fight drug trafficking in Colombia. Despite the fact that this novel is based on the drug war, something important to note is that in it Restrepo never uses the word "droga" because she says that "she was convinced that all readers read between the lines."

Sweet company

Sweet company, whose action takes place again in Colombia, appeared in 1995 and presents the clash of two worlds, the pragmatic capital of the protagonist with that of a poor neighborhood full of superstitions. This novel focuses on marginalized women who have no right to "defend themselves" and explores themes of exploitation, "poor women being abused by leaders of religious institutions" and class conflicts. The protagonist of this novel is called "la Mona". She tells of her trip to the neighborhoods of Bogotá to investigate "the apparition of an angel"; and the rape of her by a priest who sells and disappears her child after her birth. The novel, which had good reviews, has been recognized with two awards.

The Dark Bride

La novia oscura (1999) is the product of a meticulous journalistic investigation that Restrepo carried out in a neighborhood of prostitutes in a remote part of the Colombian jungle. The book is a sequence of events that focuses on a chapter in the life of Sayonara, a prostitute working in Colombia during the 1940s.

Delirium

The novel that consecrated Restrepo definitively is Delirio, described by Nobel laureate José Saramago, president of the 2004 Alfaguara Prize jury, as a great labor of love, “new, a breath of fresh air ”, surprising “for the quality of the language and the narrative structures, which intersect harmoniously until the final climax.” For this story of love and madness set in Colombia in the 1990s —the decline of a society immersed in in drug trafficking and money laundering—, the author uses resources of magical realism and the so-called sicaresque novel.^{[citation required]} In In this novel, Laura Restrepo does something different because instead of using a female journalist as in her previous works, she proceeds to a male protagonist who "is not a journalist but a professor of literature". In this novel the person who narrates "does not know and asks to try to find out, is the agent to rebuild". The novel begins with a man named Aguilar. Agustina Londoño is the protagonist of the novel and is a woman who comes from a high-class family with parents from high society. She is married to Aguilar who is a university professor who at the beginning of the novel arrives from a trip to find his wife in a very bad state. He meets his wife, Agustina, who seems mentally unwell. She has completely lost her mind but does not know the factors that have caused this dementia. Aguilar loves her wife very much, completely unaware that he caused the dementia or "delusion" in her, Aguilar sets out to investigate what has produced this madness that his wife has. He investigates things that he could attribute to this and investigates the family of his wife. Upon finding out his family he realizes all the family secrets they have had for many generations and their past. The secrets of his childhood and his relatives, such as his abortion, his brother's mistreatment for having homosexual tendencies, his parents' business with Pablo Escobar -a character also in the novel, hereditary factors- the mental problems suffered by some of their relatives, and suicide.

Too Many Heroes

Five years later, he publishes Demasiados héroes, the autobiographical story of Lorenza and her son Mateo, who arrive in Buenos Aires in search of Ramón, with whom they had an affair —whose fruit is Mateo—during the "dirty war" Argentina, when both were passionate militants who opposed the Videla dictatorship. & # 34; The novel that she has just published, Too Many Heroes (Editorial Alfaguara), is very similar to reality and, specifically, to the reality that she lived, including the dark episode. He warmly approaches the difficulties that parents who served in the military had and have to tell the story to their children, explain something to them about that couple they had one day and no longer have and that is an absent father or mother." With this story, Laura wants to get the two rhetorics out of history. On the one hand, literary rhetoric and, on the other hand, political rhetoric."

Hot South

Hot sur (2012) tells of the lives of three Latin American women and their life transitions upon arriving in the United States. The protagonist is a Colombian woman, named María Paz, who has emigrated to the United States. She is married to a police officer who also comes from an immigrant family. Something unexpected happens and her husband is murdered and she puts all the blame on herself and as a result she is wrongfully thrown in jail. Her husband appears to have an affiliation with a gun dealer. While she is in jail, she gets a lawyer to help her and they release her from jail but we find out from her after her that she has to attend her trial but she fails to do it and he runs away from her. In addition, it appears that María has had an affair with his wife's brother and in the end, it is not a happy ending for her as they intend, unexpectedly, they realize that in addition to being her brother, he is also her murderer.. This book incorporates many elements such as homicide, problems between family members, a marginalized Latin American woman facing problems in the United States, and finally mixes love.

Awards

• Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 1997 (Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara) by Sweet company
• Prix France Culture 1998 to the best foreign novel published in France by Sweet company
• Premio Arzobispo Juan de Sanclemente 2002 (alumnos de bachillerato de Santiago de Compostela a la mejor novel en lengua española) by Sweet company
• Novela 2004 Alfaguara Award Delirium
• Premio Grinzane Cavour 2006
• Colombian National Literature Award (Reviews) Books & Letters)

Used bibliography

• Averis, Kate (2013). «Laura Restrepo (Colombia, 1950)». In Corral, Will; De Castro, Juan; Birns, Nicholas, eds. The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel: Bolaño and After. New York: Bloomsbury. pp. 252-257. ISBN 9781441140395.
• Carvalho, Susan (2007). Contemporary Spanish American Novels by Women: Mapping the Narrative. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis. ISBN 9781855661424.
• Herrera, Adriana (November/December 2007). «Chapters in the Life of Laura Restrepo». Americas 59 (6): 14-19.
• Hughes Davies, Lloyd (2012). «Laura Restrepo (1950-)». In Pastor, Brígida M.; Hughes Davies, Lloyd, eds. A Companion to Latin American Women Writers. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis. pp. 197-211.
• Kollmann, Raúl (12 May 2009). «Interview the writer Laura Restrepo, about her new novel, Too many heroes». The Class. Archived from the original on 23 August 2011. Consultation on 19 April 2012. Reproduced from Page 12.
• Manrique, Jaime (2001). «Laura Restrepo». Bomb 78: 54-9. Consultation on 11 March 2015.
• Melis, Daniela; Restrepo, Laura (May, 2005). «An Interview with Laura Restrepo». Chasqui 34 (1): 114-129.
• Morales de Franco, Saray (December 2004). "Laura Restrepo's Delirium Profile". Thought and Culture (7): 168-9. Consultation on 11 March 2015.
• Rioseco, Marcelo (May-August 2014). «Hot Sur by Laura Restrepo». World Literature Today 88 (3): ??. Consultation on 11 March 2015.