Customer Reviews

Our Lady of the Assassins

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After having read Lolita just a few days ago, I have to say that La Virgen de Los Sicarios is much more understandable to me now. The movie was flat and too caricature-like in comparison to the rich and lyrical Spanish that Vallejo utilizes throughout this marvelous book. It tried to capture in a very clumsy and insipid manner the surrealistic touches that give this short novella an undeniably acrid and aching texture. He does with Spanish what Nabokov did with English in Lolita, giving you heaps of a deranged poetic genius obsessed with the sexual power of minors living on the peripheries of proper society. And like Lolita, Fernando, the protagonist of this book, is as unreliable a narrator as Humbert Humbert. Only that in La Virgen de los Sicarios the pathos is much more tinged with a hideous cynicism that is kept thoroughly, but not wholly, veiled in Lolita by an unhinged comical repartee. There was no laughter in La Virgen de los Sicarios. I guess Vallejo wanted it that way, as a commentary on the sad nature of contemporary Colombia. And here youth isn't violated and infiltrated by a rogue and hideously selfish pedophile but is instead robbed of innocence by an uncaring and hypocritical society. In other words, Fernando exploits these boys after the fact of their "spiritual rape" while in Lolita Humbert Humbert is the very instrument of the "spiritual rape" of little Dolores Haze. This significant difference makes Fernando on the surface less culpable for the moral depravity of children, but he deludes himself, like Humbert Humbert, into thinking that he's somehow above it all. He's not. In fact, he actively participates in it, which makes him as debased as Humbert Humbert, or even worse since he so maliciously criticizes the very thing he indulges in. The author definitely imbibed deeply from the Nabokovian fountain of untruthful narrations, youth mercilessly exploited, and the terrible consequences of sexual monomania and spiritual emptiness masked by sophistry. There is more here than meets the eye. The two novels should be sold in one set, so as to allow readers to savor the wonders of two impressionistic novels written in two very different languages that are so alike and unalike in tenor, but that speak to powerful truths about the human condition.

Whereas once, say around the time of the Monroe Doctrine, the Western Hemisphere was more or less similar in development region to region due to its common background of having been colonized by European powers, there has ever since been an ever-widening gap due to the differing influences of the colonizers of the north contrasted with the south.
The north, primarily colonized by the British and the French, was viewed as place where individual colonists and their families could create a new homeland and work toward self-sufficiency, exporting valuable natural resources back to the home countries in Europe and provide, in return, a market for what Europe could produce. The southern regions, on the other hand, were primarily colonized by the Spanish and the Portuguese, who sought only to extract natural and agricultural resources for themselves (they wanted gold, mostly), and pay the native inhabitants back by converting them to their brand of Christianity.
So now that all the countries of the Western Hemisphere are nations independent of Europe, the gap between the north and the south has expanded to its ulimate polarity: the United States and Canada are global economic powerhouses with high standards of living for the majority of their people, whereas in Latin America the people groan under the yoke of their own exploitative governments, an impractical and hypocritical rule of the church, and by imposed agricultural economies that do not, on the whole, raise sustaining food for the people, but superfluous, non-food-items for wealthy nations elsewhere--chocolate, coffee, sugar, rubber, tropical woods, and, the most lucrative of all, coca, that is processed into cocaine.
The country of Columbia (interestingly, one whose name is the closest to "Columbus") is almost archetypal in this concept...coffee, cocaine, and Catholicism (the kind of Catholicism that, for example, continues to forbid contraception in a country where the population has completely overrun its viable economic opportunities), and "Our Lady of the Assassins" is a desperate, but powerfully human cry from deep in the heart of that situation in a country still struggling for survival and meaning.
Fernando Vallejo, in presenting this tragedy, seems to offer no obvious hope of solution out of the misery, but only torturously writhes around and around within it, reporting rampant gang killing after gang killing like the city of Medellin's (idiomatically renamed "Medallo" in reference to a sub-machine gun) own news media in a never-ending cycle of ever-avenging death and despair while eternally on its knees supplicating "Santa Maria Auxiliadora" or whatever other Saint also bled and suffered, unable to really provide much help beyond solace through sympathy and maybe a hope of spiritual liberation after death.
Yet, as long as there is humanity, there still can be hope in THIS world, and where there are tears and laughter, there is humanity. The book is actually very funny in parts, and certainly ironic, as if, better than even crying, all one can do is laugh and attempt to enliven the otherwise-too-horrendous-to-fully-contemplate journey to Only God Knows Where. I found it fascinating that in the prayers requesting a "blessing" of the assassin's bullets, their requests were that the bullets wouldn't miss and in their deaths, the victims WOULDN'T SUFFER...as if even in their killing the assassins retained some germ of love. In fact, in the distortions of their slang, to "be in love with" somebody is to be out to kill them. They're all angels...avenging angels.
Most importantly, this book is a love story, a love story between a youth whose fellow gang members had all been destroyed, and an older man whose family had all died, that in their aloneness and solitude, they found a place for each other in their lives. I cannot fail to see that this, too, is a metaphor for hidden forces on the side of survival, for when the departing elders and the emerging youth love each other, there is a knitting together of life's circle and the wheel will somehow find a way to keep spinning. Vallejo may see that wheel like a Buddhist wheel of karma, where the only hope of escape is to be individually snuffed out into nirvana, or else maybe like an ancient inquistion torture wheel upon which the bones of humanity are broken and put on elevated display to engender a fear of God, but I think in a culture that did not, industriously, invent the wheel, THIS wheel, an engine of love and humanity, will be, instead of industrialism, its strength and ultimate salvation. And the best expression of that is through the arts such as this one, now in translation made accessible to those of us who reside in the northern hemisphere and may have heretofore remained ignorant of just what was going on in the cultures of a people with whom we once shared a common beginning. This is either a dire warning or a prayer for assistance...either way, we can no longer practically or philosophically afford to remain so isolated.