On Fernando Vallejo, the Times Literary Supplement, 5 July, 2002

To an English reader, Fernando Vallejo’s writing could be described as a polished Colombian Burroughs stylistically close to Céline. Vallejo became a celebrated author through the best selling La Virgen de los Sicarios (1994), followed by an autobiographical cycle of five novels, El Desbarrancadero being a coda to the cycle. The word “desbarrancadero”, a Latin American noun meaning precipice, foretells nothing good. It is a long, ugly sounding word. It is related to “desbarrar”, meaning to slip, but also to talk nonsense. It is a perfect title. We are before the satirical soliloquy of Fernando, a gay street wise misanthrope who has returned from Mexico to Medellín to look after his brother, now dying from Aids, his return giving way to a corrosive portrait of the dysfunctional Redón family and its decadent surroundings. If Dario, the moribund brother, is an endearing reckless character addicted to all the drugs on the market with whom the narrator reminisces the good old times with lovely rent boys, the mother, la Loca, is the principle of chaos and has devoted her life to endless reproduction, her obscene laziness being counterbalanced by her docile husband who has become her maid. Past and present family saga is interwoven with a savage invective against everything: A Colombia where poverty, hit killings and corruption reign rampant, Mexico and extortion, religion and the Pope, pregnant women and Black American layabouts on the welfare system. This politically incorrect dystopia is presented as the truth about the state of things by a questionable narrator who proceeds bumpily in circles, ending with a whimper at odds with the carnavalesque tone and failing to develop a seemingly important part of the novel, that is, the narrator is supposed to be a dead narrator. Hilarious, bitter, compassionate, El desbarrancadero rambles on with a demolishing force haunted by a spectre of death that becomes life affirming in the end. In the end though, what remains is a rather flawed book that reminds us that errare humanum est.