Shade elastic
, by the Colombian writer Juan Cárdenas (1978), is not a political novel.
But politics is in its pages, the most violent and arbitrary.
Does not take up much space.
Just a few references to two bodies, a young woman and a young man, found at a crossroads, with signs of “suffering the unspeakable before giving them the final shot”.
Later, a demonstration of Indians demanding that the lands of their ancestors that were taken from them be returned to them.
Two indications not so much political as a way of understanding politics - or parapolitics - in some parts of the world: that of torture and physical elimination.
For a novel that basically deals with an archeology of warrior rites in search of its place in the present, these two “political” data are enough to tell us that in some Latin American countries, whatever is narrated is narrated, there will always be a background of the most ominous politics.
Cárdenas's novel is steeped in spells and magic.
We have two central characters.
Don Sando and Miguel.
Two macheteros, two warriors in search of movements called "shadow games", shapes and arabesques with the machete and feet to confuse the opponent.
We are almost in the field of ethnology.
Don Sando and Miguel, teacher and disciple, need to rescue that Afro-Colombian technique from oblivion, a need that in the long run can also be interpreted as political.
The title of this book refers to a luck in the "shadow game."
Shadow elastic is a very refined technique to fight in the midst of absolute darkness.
If one of the opponents does not know this technique, he is a dead man.
And this is where the matter takes on almost comical edges.
The exhibition of the movements, the geometric drawing in the arrangement of the machetero's body on the battlefield, is described with humor and with a certain air of invented rituality, almost deliberately implausible.
I just have to put one downside to this serious well-resolved narrative game.
His excessive lexical particularism.
Sometimes it becomes unintelligible, thereby interrupting the reader's enjoyment of this side of the Atlantic.
'Shadow elastic'
Author:
Juan Cárdenas
Publisher:
Sixth Floor, 2020
Format:
Soft cover or pocket.
112 pages
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