The Armies: Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

by Anne McLean (Translator), Evelio Rosero (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2010

  $12.35

  In a small town in the mountains of Colombia, Ismael, a retired teacher, spends his mornings gathering oranges in the sunshine and spying on his neighbour as she sunbathes naked in her garden. Returning from a walk one morning he discovers that his wife has disappeared. Then more people go missing, and not-so-distant gunfire signals the approach of war. Most of the villagers make their escape, but Ismael cannot leave without his Otilia. He becomes an unwilling witness to the senseless civil war that sweeps through his country with a tragic inevitability. In The Armies Rosero has created a hallucinatory, relentless, captivating narrative often as violent as the events it describes, told by an old man battered by a reality he no longer recognizes.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2008

  $3.28

  Ismael is a retired school teacher in a small Colombian village. He gathers oranges, admires beautiful women and has an idyllic everyday life. When the village is ransacked by an anonymous army, he is thrown into the fray and his mental stability collapses. The tragedy which engulfs the inhabitants of this village has indeed become an everyday occurrence in this country. People are kidnapped; killed; they disappear at the hands of unidentified groups such as the armies of the title: Guerillas, Paramilitaries, narcotics traffickers. Instead of describing the reality of an unpredictable violent world, Rosero imitates it - with the dense, confused prose of a man going mad. Instead of portraying violence, he has created a violent novel. In this story, no-one is spared, no one is protected.