Praise for Return to the Dark Valley
“Action-packed plotting propels this rabidly contemporary novel forward, as it examines the movement of people across the shifting geopolitical landscape, the impossibility of returning and the potential redemptive power of poetry.”
— The New York Times Book Review
"A complex, challenging story that speaks to the terror and dislocation of the age.”
— Kirkus Reviews
"An unsettling and brilliant document of contemporary life; highly recommended."
—Library Journal , starred review
“Gamboa possesses considerable talent at creating energetic scenes that spiral off in intriguing directions.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“Fans of Roberto Bolaño will feel right at home in this globetrotting tale of misfit poets and ultraviolent drug lords. [...] [A] page turner that is fiercely contemporary and wickedly funny in its analysis of the forces tearing at the seams of the world.”
— Miami Rail
Praise for Santiago Gamboa
"Gamboa's talent at cultivating intrigue and the extravagant energy of his stories make him compulsive reading."
— Times Literary Supplement
"Brilliantly translated, Night Prayers is an incredible reading experience with a pounding heart and wisdom to boot."
—Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore
"Gamboa's work calls to mind Roberto Bolaño in its masterful suspense, complex literary references, and frank depiction of violence, sex, and drugs."
—Publisher's Weekly
"Gamboa's storytelling impresses."
—The Complete Review
"Gamboa's strength is an apparently inexhaustible stream of narriative invention, an addictive 'and then, and then' quality that, at its best, erupts into flourishes of breathtaking poetry."
—Shelf Awareness
"Each novel by Santiago Gamboa is at the forefront of the best Latin American novels. Gamboa dismantles the legacy of Chandler and Hammett, adapting it to the craggy environs of Colombia, and adds to it a tireless sense of ethics. His novels revitalize a genre that we thought could do no more."
—Martín Solares, author of The Black Minutes
"This novel stands on its own as a masterwork of storytelling."
— Publishers Weekly about Necropolis
"A work that is by turns tender, farcical, explicit, bombastic and never less than engrossing."
— The Irish Times about Necropolis
★ 09/01/2017
"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.
2017-07-04
Or, love and loss in a time of ruin."Cities are bad and they lie in wait for people." So says a police officer to a hospitalized victim of a street beating in Madrid, a city embroiled in all sorts of madness, including a wave of jihadi violence and economic unrest. That victim is a priest and former guerrilla who has been trying to distance himself from a past that is catching up with him, just as Manuela Beltrán, at the center of Colombian writer Gamboa's swirling kaleidoscope of a novel, struggles to come to terms with her own: a poet, student of philology, and an all-around sort of mystery woman, she yearns to avenge childhood abuse even as she keeps questionable company in the Spanish capital and uses literature as an escape. Manuela is brilliant and apparently sane, which might not be said of the odd fellow called Tertullian, who claims to be the son of the pope and to be "the voice of reason and the future, emerging into the ether from the caves of hyper-consciousness to bring you the words of the ancient masters and sages, broadcasting from obscure and forgotten highways." Each of these characters—along with a couple of others who step over from Night Prayers (2016), an earlier novel of Gamboa's—turns up in more or less regular alternation as the storyline draws them together‚ now with the addition of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, whose dramatized life story occupies a central part of Gamboa's tale. In a narrative that moves across continents, from Spain to Ethiopia and Latin America, Gamboa would seem to be saying that none of us is at home anywhere and that, as Manuela muses, "Some worlds just don't mix with others. You just have to know it." A complex, challenging story that speaks to the terror and dislocation of the age.
