Violence My Family's Colombian War

A family's experience is bounded and warped by the violence and instability that overtook Colombia in the last half of the 20th century. Esther Angarita Samiento, Ramírez's grandmother, came of age in Colombia's hills, alongside the country's decades of upheaval and turbulence, "La Violencia," launched by the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948. As corrupt Conservative leaders struggled to keep power, and Liberal revolutionaries led their crusades into ever-greater extremity, Samiento started and grew her own family, expanding their business and land holdings among several fincas. Samiento's story reflects familiar themes for women of her generation, particularly in a conservative Catholic country--individual dreams forfeited to marital expectations, jarring personal betrayal, and stoic grief. But the consuming brutality of Colombia's economic and political struggles provides a distinct shape to Samiento's experience. In stately and solemn prose, Ramírez, a writer and critic, outlines a series of eventful shifts in the national history at the fringes of her family's story, shading their experience with gruesome details of murders in close proximity, as well as with illegitimate elections, American entanglement, and drug trafficking. But the author's work is first and foremost a familial history; the roots of her family's trajectory are complex, encompassing colonial projects, political experimentation, and geographical and agricultural details. Her attempts to shade in these contours grant color and context to the personal, but cannot give full clarity. As she writes, "Colombia is a land of many truths," and the particular experience of her ancestors is but one example of how the pursuit of ideals rubs against lived reality, in an environment where the gravitational pull of violence and turmoil is virtually inescapable. Drenching the family narrative with the frail complexities of love and memory, Ramírez decouples it from Colombia's relentless and stereotypical violence to claim her own piece of its story. A sensitive literary endeavor to honor a delicate, devastating past. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.