The Angel of Galilea [Hardcover]

Laura Restrepo (Author), Dolores M. Koch (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 14, 1998

Laura Restrepo's prize-winning The Angel of Galilea, newly translated into English, is a sublimely original, utterly contemporary story of love, faith, poverty, and mystery.

Mona, a Colombian journalist once idealistic and determined to better the world, has been reduced to recounting the vapid pronouncements of newly crowned beauty queens for the tabloid journal that employs her. When her editor sends her to investigate reported sightings of an angel in a barrio on the outskirts of Bogotá, it's just another day's work. The angel craze has arrived late from America, and true to Colombian fashion she will now be expected to "warm up another topic already cold in the U.S."
        
When she arrives in the flooded poorest-of-the-poor barrio of Galilea, she finds the residents in passionate conflict over a strange but beautiful young man. Magnificent, overwhelming, enigmatic, and possessing an undeniable sexual magnetism, he is revered by some as an angel and denounced by others, including the local priest, as an infernal impostor. Mona reads the story of this "angel without a name" in tattered journals transcribed by his mother and communes silently with him in the moonlight, falling deeply, passionately in love with him. Risking all, she commits herself to saving him from the forces that would destroy him.

This silent, powerful angel, left out of the official heavenly host, personifies for the outcast, impoverished residents of Galilea their faith and hope. For Mona he is the avatar of a mystery she abandoned in childhood and, in a single, passionate, intimate embrace, fulfills both her desire to love completely and her longing to believe.

The Angel of Galilea has been awarded the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in Mexico and the Prix France Culture in France.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"A few days before it all started, three men raped a crazy woman in the garden in front of my building. It was around then that my neighbor's dog vaulted from a third-story window, landed on the street, and walked away unharmed. And the leper who sells lottery tickets ... gave birth to a healthy, beautiful baby."

To Mona, a cynical young reporter for one of Bogota's many popular tabloids, these events seem significant only in retrospect. "Surely those were signs, among many others," she remarks, "but then again this insane city gives off so many doomsday warnings that no one pays attention anymore." Certainly, Mona's own great adventure begins ordinarily enough when she is told to investigate the presence of an angel in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. At first she assumes that this is yet another example of Colombian journalists warming up "what is already passé in Miami." But when she arrives in Galilea in a cold, driving rain, and is taken to see the tall, dark, handsome--and nearly naked--celestial spirit, she begins to wonder if the stories might not be true.

Of course, this being Colombia, it isn't long before the angel becomes both the object of a religious cult and the rallying point for a revolutionary movement. As peasants flock to him, the army and the church hunt him down. Meanwhile Mona finds herself falling in love with this possibly fallen angel, even as she continues to dig for less supernatural explanations for his strange power. Though Laura Restrepo's prose occasionally overheats, for the most part her writing is refreshingly matter-of-fact with just a touch of irony, allowing even those who would be happy never to see another of Raphael's cherubs peering out from a T-shirt or coffee mug to enjoy this angelic tale. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly

Like her fellow countryman, painter and sculptor Fernando Botero, Restrepo uses smoothly inflated characters exuding innocence and sensuality to recount a story rooted in the religious and social traditions of her native Colombia. The narrator of this internationally bestselling novel is a cynical Colombian reporter known as La Monita (or, "Blondie"). When she is assigned to cover the appearance of an angel in Galilea, one of Bogota's poorest neighborhoods, she finds her skepticism challenged. She's seduced first by the peasants' enormous faith and then by the loveliness of the huge angel himself. The plot thickens when a malevolent priest and his gang of youths persecute the angel, but it's softened by prose that's as light as a feather and by wit as sharp as a toot from Gabriel's horn. Although La Monita spares no effort to find out if the angel is real or if other, more earthly explanations ?epilepsy or drug abuse mixed with superstition?can explain him, the point of the narrative has more to do with the people's special need for angels. As La Monita says, "Colombia happens to be the country in the world with the most miracles per square foot... we maintain a direct line with the other worlds, and can only survive as a nation with a daily dose of superstition." If that is so, then this work is Restrepo's serum for her country and a teaspoon of sugar for the rest of us.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 193 pages
• Publisher: Crown (September 14, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609603264
• ISBN-13: 978-0609603260
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #992,915 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Angel of Galilea es una dulce compañía, April 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Angel of Galilea (Hardcover)

The Angel of Galilea se llama, en español, Dulce Compañía. Es una novela irreverente, juguetona, esperanzadora. El amor de la reportera por el ángel, más terrestre que otra cosa, más colombiano que étereo, es una delicada metáfora de la forma cómo la gente de Colombia se relaciona con su cruda realidad. Vale la pena leerlo!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting story in human self-deception, May 6, 2000

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Angel of Galilea (Paperback)

This book is a fascinating study in the different perceptions of people when confronted with the same phenomena - and with the way individuals cope with unpleasant or painful situations.

Is the young man seen as an "angel" a saint or insane? If the later, is it in his best interest to get mental health help? Is the hope he imparts to the poor bario good or bad for the community? If you want easy, pat answers, this book is not for you. However, if you want insight into the messiness of life, of the fragility of hope, this book is well worth you time.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Oddly interesting . . ., August 2, 2006

By 

Maurice Williams "mauricewms" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Angel of Galilea (Paperback)

In keeping with a long established tradition of mine where, when traveling to a country for the first time, I find and read a novel by an author from that country that highlights the people and atmosphere of the country. My recent trip to Columbia sent me on a search for a novel by someone other than Garcia-Marquez and I found this oddly interesting story of "The Angel of Galilea". The novel recasts the story of a fallen archangel who appears in a small mountain village outside of Bogotá. While I'm not very familiar with the religious aspects of archangels and the Celestial Hierarchy, quick research indicates that the author used that framework to craft this tale. The novel is told in first person narrative by a reporter who was sent to Galilea to investigate the angle sighting. Upon arrival in the village, the reporter meets a host of people who all claimed to have experienced the angel. It is through these villagers that Restrepo portrays the blind faith and rational skepticism of us mortals.

"The Angels of Galilea" was a fair read for me. Visiting Bogotá while reading the book did provide some small moments of familiarity; however, I didn't get the shock of recognition that sometimes happens when my life experiences cross with my literary ones. The novel did aptly portray the pervasiveness of the catholic religion throughout Columbia. With a population that is 95% catholic I barely encountered public spaces that didn't have some Christian signification by way of emblems, statues, or the likes thereof. While visiting the church at Monserrate in Bogotá I immediately recognized the image of the bloody Christ as similar to the bloody Christ mentioned in the novel. I found the writing (translation) well paced with faint elements of the mythical, mystical realism that pervades the critically acclaimed literature of South America in general, Garcia-Marquez and Allende in particular. Those with greater knowledge of the angelology may extract more from this novel than I. I never wanted to chunk the book but I wasn't racing to the next page either.