The 3 best books of Jorge Franco

Targeted by himself Gabriel García Márquez Like his literary successor, Jorge Franco rises to such a high bar to the altars of literature and offers us a brilliant "you do what you can." Something that in his case serves to participate in an interesting Colombian literature in generational harmony with Angela Becerra.

But what about Jorge Franco is on many occasions a particular exploration of realities (almost always rooted in his native Medellín), as deep as it is crude, which ends up rescuing an imaginary loaded with violence at times sifted by that necessary unreality of oblivion.

The funny thing is how Jorge projects it towards fiction, half exorcization half resilience made into literature, the evolution of characters plunged into summary procedures of drug dealers and hitmen of all kinds and even in every institution. Because not so long ago that Medellín was that city as if it were transported from the Wild West.

Make literature with one's own life as a tightrope walker, with characters that survive longer than they live. Because every notion of fear is pure survival, instinct. And the victims always are when they remain. Because they always wander around looking for answers or lost affections. In the best of luck perhaps exposing their stories for a certain Jorge Franco to novel them.

Top 3 recommended novels by Jorge Franco

The world outside

Things always happen out there. The others move with their avatars beyond our gaze, where they no longer reach the hands. All those are the others. According to religion our neighbors, according to Hobbes men made wolves for man.

Isolda lives locked in a strange and fascinating castle at the same time, so alien to the city of Medellín in which she is situated, how unique are its inhabitants and the life they lead. The atmosphere of unreality that is breathed is oppressive for the adolescent, who finds in the forest that surrounds her the only possible respite from her loneliness.

But the invisible threats from the outside world creep silently through the branches of the trees near the castle. With a perfect management of tension, Jorge Franco builds in this novel a fairy tale with dark overtones that ends up becoming the unhinged story of a kidnapping.

Inside and outside the fortress, love, that indomitable monster, is shown as an obsession that alienates and brutalizes, that it tries to subdue, that awakens desires for revenge and from which it only seems possible to escape by accepting death as destiny.

«Every afternoon I go to the edge in case she goes out again and I wait for her until six to see if she goes up to the forest. But I haven't even seen her leaning out the window again. Sometimes they whistle at me from somewhere and I get excited because I think it's a sign from her, but the whistle gets lost among the trees and changes from one place to another. "

Rosario Scissors

Life is an extreme feeling when fear rules. For the worse generally. But also for the better on some occasion, when little things can be enjoyed with that fullness that the strange certainty of fleetingness confers.

“Since Rosario was shot point-blank while they were kissing her, she confused the pain of love with that of death. But he came out of doubt when he parted his lips and saw the gun.

Thus begins the story of Rosario Tijeras, an ageless woman who, as a child, entered the terrible scene of the hitman and prostitution in Medellín at the end of the eighties.

Now Antonio, her unconditional friend, remembers her from the corridor of the hospital where Rosario struggles with death. Her narrative is the portrait of a ruthless murderer, but it is also a retelling of the stark destiny of a generation of young people who grew up in the communes with no other alternatives than violence.

The sky shot

I also expected that when I arrived in Medellín for work reasons, a shooting heaven. Later I discovered that the city was quite another and that the people I met there transmit that special magic, that life in abundance of those who are known to be survivors of the earthly hells.

An exciting novel about the generation of children of the great Colombian drug traffickers of the nineties and a faithful portrait of today's Medellín.

Larry returns to the country twelve years after the disappearance of his father, a mobster very close to Pablo Escobar in the nineties. His remains have finally been found in a mass grave and Larry returns to retrieve and bury them.

Upon his arrival in Medellín, Pedro, his great childhood friend, awaits him, who will take him directly from the airport to the celebration of the Alborada, a popular festival in which the city loses control while gunpowder explodes for a whole night.

Larry's encounter with his mother, a former beauty queen who went from having everything to having nothing, and who is now mired in depression and drug addiction; the memories of a turbulent family past and the rediscovery of a city in which the remnants of the darkest period in the history of Colombia are still perceived, are some of the threads that connect this novel in which the author -with the mastery narrative that characterizes him - he manages to portray a generation of children of drug trafficking, who ended up being victims of their own parents.

Other recommended books by Jorge Franco Ramos

The void in which you float

Only the most extraordinary storytellers can dare to play that game of chance and coincidences that weave destinies. In substance and form. Because parallel stories, with their unpredictable intersections, burst existence towards the change of sequence, the vital mark. And that in the purely structural aspect, has to be composed in a way that points to an end and a new start in the existence of the characters. The point is to give it the foundation so that it is not only a change of scene but a change of existence.

The explosion of a bomb and the disappearance of a child will inescapably weave the drama of the protagonists of The Void In Which You Float, and then we will be witnesses (in this game of fiction in which one story seems to develop within another, like in a set of Russian dolls) of three stories that share the same character.

In the first, a young couple loses their young son in a terrorist attack: the mother survives, but there is no trace of the child. In the second, a young and unknown writer wins an important literary prize: now he enjoys and suffers fame far from the man who raised him, an enigmatic being but full of compassion and tenderness, a kind of nighttime artist who, dressed as a woman, , always aspired to sing in his own cabaret.

And in the third, that man who makes a living, and sometimes dresses as a woman, suddenly arrives at his boarding house with a lost child: he explains that the child's parents died in an accident and that he must take care of him, since he is his only family. Thus, the three stories intersect, emerging from each other, to provoke an intense and intriguing reading that asks about those who leave us with the weight of their absence.