(Starred review) Gamboa, Santiago. Return to the Dark Valley. Europa. Sept. 2017. 424p. tr. from Spanish by Howard Curtis. ISBN 9781609454258. pap. $18; ebk. ISBN 9781609454265.
“It’s good to write in the middle of a storm,” says the consul while conceding that it might not be ethical, which is why he focuses on the French poet Arthur Rimbaud in his own work. Yet Rimbaud’s story as enfolded here echoes the violence, personal and political, and the crazed idealism that permeates award-winning Colombian author Santiago’s formidable, in-your-face novel about our horribly fractured world. It follows Night Prayers, which also featured the consul, a Colombian diplomat linked to a young woman named Juana, who has just demanded that he leave Rome to meet her in Madrid. There, terrorists have taken over the Irish Embassy, threatening to cut throats if their demands aren’t met. (Santiago’s account of these West-Islamist tensions registers not as flat reportage but cut-to-the-quick storytelling.) The consul gets into trouble by intervening to protect a Colombian woman named Manuela, whose painful story of childhood abuse redeemed by her poetic gift has already been spinning through the pages. He also meets Tertullian, who sounds like a right-wing preacher, which proves that the old categories don’t hold (Tertullian adheres to the structure of radical religious belief but without God). With Juana, they travel to Colombia to right acidly etched wrongs and finally to Africa, finding apotheosis in Rimbaud’s old haunts. VERDICT An unsettling and brilliant document of contemporary life; highly recommended.
