Zebra Color Floral Arrangements

a little late, but there are now critical of Chile. Bisam investigates and explores Alvaro Caicedo
in Mercury

Sunday December 14, 2008
Rev Book / Arts and Letters, The M

"My body is a cell"
An empire of misery

The figure of the Colombian writer and myth alive in an "autobiography" built by Alberto Fuguet, who compiled and edited his diaries, private letters, film reviews, poems and how I had lost a hand. ALVARO

Bisam

In one of its most paradoxical My body is a cell can be read as a little morality tale about the Latin American intellectual relations with the global culture. That's because at its most unhinged Andrés Caicedo (1951-1977), Colombian writer and cinesifilítico suicide, the U.S. lost in trying write and sell a couple of scripts (written in English that nobody seems to understand) for a horror movie based on Lovecraft's work.

sounds like a joke and is one of the many interpretations that can have the text. The point: to Caicedo goes wrong. Defeated, he ends up back on his heels and returning to the intensity of the tedium of life of Cali. But this story is recorded and can perhaps reveal why the Chilean Alberto Fuguet (who rode this "autobiography" of Caicedo on fragments of personal diaries, private letters, film reviews, poems and how I had lost a hand) is interested in life and work of Colombia: the vital angst is perhaps similar Caicedo which almost always brandish its characters, experts in lost and found in unusual places or nearby.

But there's a catch there. Read the volume as a work of Fuguet subtracts the single most provocative can wield the story before the reader: in their own right, can be interpreted Andres Caicedo-over or beyond the hagiographies of the excess, insanity and banality - as a powerful cultural symbol. That lies in its ability to synthesize involuntary spirit of the times he played, the 70, the boom, the coups in Latin America, Bergman and Truffaut films, cocaine-and make it better involuntarily under writing . Of course, that is in some of his other books (the devastating compendium of reviews Eye cinema or the novel Long live the music) but here raises (Caicedo like a zombie "literary?) With force and clarity by revealing the pathetic condition, contradictory and fragile in his voice: "Words, words, strong economies, grant me a dream in which you can look to the future (...) to send me to send you in me and for five years not leave. "

Under all this lies a tale as simple as dramatic, amalditado a teenager who escapes from his native Cali (which calls Calicalabozo: "No more to this city, not that close) to get lost and fail in their American dreams of escape and finally return to a country that is overwhelming, while looking-through addictions as diverse as the party, drugs, film, literature and desire, a way to overcome his despair: "I took, impeccably, 25 Valium Blues and became a deep cut on the wrists with a kitchen knife I could find more oxidized, nothing happened to me (...) the wounds are fully healed. "

For this reason, the book becomes relevant read, alongside the purely biographical fragments, film reviews Caicedo, real snapshots of your universe decaying. Perhaps the central value of the text and the work of Caicedo is here, where the cancer of self-destruction gives way to something deeper, less romantic light or infinitely more viscous. And interests rather than the artist who self-mutilate and spreads his reign of misery while doping with Seconal and fetishized to the Rolling Stones, the film critic profile that tests the limits of his writing. This gesture, in which the hero is about inexorably to self-destruction, silence is certified as a form of inner peace, which moves the reader.

That show, which could be, especially towards the end, together with Hurt Nine Inch Nails background, is the demolition of the personality, perceived by the reader in an amazing final confusion, as if the amazing obsession with a young Colombian frozen outlining, ironically, the stigma terminal maturity and distressing premature. Caicedo said: "I can not help with old age in my teens (...) I am very much alive. I'm dead. "