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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Deserving winner of the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize,
By
This review is from: The Armies (Hardcover)
Ismael is a 70 year old retired school teacher, who lives peacefully with his wife Otilia in a Colombian village. His days are spent picking oranges from the trees in his garden, while longingly admiring his neighbor as she sunbathes in the nude. Surrounding this peaceful village, however, are guerrillas who grow coca in the nearby hills, who occasionally threaten and kidnap individuals but do not have much of an impact on the town as a whole. Unfortunately for the villagers, the army decides to use the village as a front in the war against the guerrillas, and slowly but steadily the villagers are caught in the middle of these warring factions.
Ismael decides to take an early morning walk, and is detained by government soldiers. Otilia goes to look for him later that day, and Ismael goes to look for her after his release. However, there is fierce fighting on that day, and he cannot find her by day's end. His neighbor's husband and son are kidnapped, and a number of villagers are killed or injured. Over the next days, as the fighting intensifies and the villagers find themselves increasingly trapped, Ismael continues his search for Otilia, vowing to remain there until she returns to him. No one in The Armies is entirely innocent or guilty: the captain of the army randomly shoots several civilians, accusing them of being guerrillas; the mayor and the local police abandon the villagers with little warning; journalists drop in for photo ops but are detached and uninterested in the villagers' plight; and the country's president denies the existence of the war, and claims that the deaths reported by the media were due to old age. This was a beautifully written novel which captures the horrors of the Colombian civil war on its people, without resorting to gruesome and repetitive depictions of violence, and is highly recommended.
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