The Colombian writer Juan Carlos Botero reappears with "Casual Facts", a novel with an autobiographical air
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Loading... - Fernanda Barbosa
- 08 Sep 2022
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It took a long time for readers to hear about Juan Carlos Botero again . Since he published The reef , in 2006, very little has happened around his work, despite the fact that he published one or another book along the way. What was talked about him had more to do with his other trades and with the fact, always newsworthy, that from time to time he has something to say about his father, the renowned painter Fernando Botero .
After making himself known on the national literary scene with The Seeds of Time (1992), a work that attracted the attention of readers and the press at the time, the Bogotá-born writer has published around ten titles, including novels , essays, storybooks and sketches about his father's art. So far, none of these publications, aside from The Reef, has generated as much curiosity.
Finally, in this year 2022, Botero will return to bookstores with a new novel that, although based on fiction, contains autobiographical details of the author that he had not dealt with before in any of his other books.
In Casual facts , a title published by the Alfaguara label, the story of Sebastián Sarmiento is told, a successful and wealthy businessman, whose life has been determined by a series of causal events., as the title points out, and apparently inconsequential, that have triggered the death of his loved ones, including his father, his best friend and his wife. These tragedies make Sebastián carry a feeling of guilt that grows and corrodes him. Suddenly everything begins to change when he is suddenly kidnapped.
The story is told from the point of view of this character narrator and from what his childhood companion, Roberto Mendoza, has to say, which could well be a nod to the author's friend, the writer Mario Mendoza. Hand in hand with these two voices, the reader reconstructs each one of the passages, through memories and fragmented testimonies.
In the first part of the novel, Sebastian is presented as a difficult figure to understand, an air of enigma covers him and the reader will decipher it as the mysteries around him are revealed. He may seem like an altruistic and pedantic type, he likes good literature and is discreet in his actions. Sebastian is a good guy, an attempted hero with good manners and business savvy who embodies the figure of the self-centered, indifferent rich man who takes care of himself and his reputation. As the pages go by, he breaks down that image of himself, implying that it is not entirely true that nothing extraordinary happens in the lives of good people. Violence bursts into his life, as in that of so many other Colombians during the 1980s, and nothing is ever the same again. Read More...
