Love notes from Siel is a weekly newsletter from Siel, who’s currently on a Remote Year trip around the world. If you love it, subscribe for free.
Dear friend —
Last Saturday, after going dancing, I left my friends and decided to walk home alone. Poblado, the tourist-friendly neighborhood of Medellin, is a colorful place to walk at night: streets brightly lit and full of people, catcalls from all directions, acrobats and street musicians bustling around vendors selling T-shirts and jewelry and cigarettes, would-be club goers lined up outside popular venues, would-be drinkers lined up against the heavy metal gates of liquor stores, which for some reason sell their wares only through tiny windows up front. I ignored the noise until I heard one especially loud voice ask, “Hey! Are you from California?”
Did I know this guy? “Yeah?” I said, and turned.
But it was just some drunk guy from New York. “I can always tell if someone’s from California,” he said, and launched into a theory about attitudes.
It took me a few minutes to extricate myself, but then I was free again! I’d made it to the next stoplight when I heard another loud voice, this time with a tone of panicked urgency: “Excuse me!”
Was someone in real trouble? Or had I dropped something? “Yes?”
But it was just another drunk guy, this time from Boston. “I just saw you walking down the street and I had to —” His spiel went on for a while.
I extricated myself again, rounded the corner to my apartment. What’s up with these Americans, I thought, the guys who are actually from Medellin don’t behave this way. Yes, they catcall, but then they leave you be, they don’t startle you with a yell then come racing up from behind —
I got home, then to calm myself to sleep, read a while —
Missionaries by Phil Klay (Penguin, 2020)
One of the greatest pleasures of reading while traveling is coming across passages that make you see anew the city you’re in. To wit, take these lines from Phil’s novel: “Medellin was a wilder, more organic thing, with its neighborhoods in the draws of steep mountainside. During the day, the buildings crawled upward into the lush green slopes, and at night the city lights poured down from the ridgelines like glowing rivers.”
Most of the descriptions in Missionaries are less beautiful and more painful, however, as this novel follows four very different people involved in the armed conflicts in Colombia spanning from the 1980s to the near-present. There’s the man trying to live a humble, normal life as a shopkeeper — after years spent working for the boss of a violent local militia. There’s the Colombian officer with a strong sense of duty, caught between managing U.S. interests against the infighting within the Colombian government. Then there’s a U.S. army medic and an American journalist in the mix. The novel traces the complex motivations and mechanics of a multifaceted war and asks: What does it mean to “win” a war? What is peace, exactly? And can we really distinguish any one war from another when the same players are simply moved around the world, like chess pieces? Read this novel to get both a macro and microscopic view of why violence seems to never end in some parts of the world, and how all the world’s complicit in keeping the war machine well-oiled.
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The Bitch by Pilar Quintana (World Editions, 2020)
The heroine of this novella, Damaris, is about 40. She lives on the Colombian coast, constantly subject to the powerful forces of nature — storms, snakes, vultures. Her childhood was not happy, and now her marriage isn’t either. She’s given up on ever having kids, after having tried for many years with her husband, from whom she now lives in tense, avoidant cohabitation. Just then a cute little puppy comes along! Damaris adopts it and gives it the name she’d hoped to give a daughter!
A typical story would let the dog fill Damaris’s life with love and solve all her problems. But this is not that kind of story. This is a strange tale of girl meets puppy, girl adopts puppy, then girl projects on puppy all the desires and disappointments and fears and angers that have so far haunted her life, leading to violent consequences. Read it if you like short novellas featuring a woman who appears quietly inured to the hand she’s been dealt by life but inside seethes with ruthless savagery.
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There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia by Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno (Bold Type Books, 2018)
It’s hard to believe walking around Medellin today that this pretty city, not too long ago, was a hotbed of violence — as was a lot of Colombia. Maria’s work of Colombian history covers the years 1996 to 2010, when drug cartels, right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing guerilla armies, and corrupt politicians all wreaked havoc on the country, killing, raping, maiming, traumatizing, and displacing thousands of civilians.
Theoretically, Maria’s work is one of hope, following a journalist, a prosecutor, and an activist who worked to demand justice and transform Colombia into what it is today. This book is tough to get through though — there are so many people getting tortured and murdered, then more people getting tortured and murdered, then yet more people getting tortured and murdered, to the point that as a reader, I found myself getting horrifyingly desensitized to the brutality of it all. Read this book for a careful journalistic accounting and a terrifyingly naked look at the brutal recent history of Colombia.
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Once a month, I share book recommendations. Shape it by recommending a read!
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love
What to do if you hate working. Heather Havrilesky has advice for those who wish they could escape the obligation to hold down a job: “a big dimension of building the work life you want is IGNORING WHAT OTHER PEOPLE BELIEVE IS NORMAL.”
When AIs write book reviews. “One of the great promises of technology is that it can do the work that humans find too boring or arduous.”
What happens when you create a bland Facebook profile. “Facebook isn’t just dangerous, I learned. It doesn’t merely have the ability to shape offline reality for its billions of users. No, Facebook is also—and perhaps for most people—senseless and demoralizing.”