Our Lady of the Assassins

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.

"Our Lady of the Assassins" Realistic and Subversive Amos Lassen and Cinema Pride "Our Lady of the Assassins" is steeped in dreamlike surrealism and lives you with a very strong dose of cinema verite. The movie tells the story of the city of Medellin where lives a Colombian writer, Fernando, who is both disgusted with life and contemptuous of religion He becomes involved sexually and romantically with teenaged boys of Medellin who kill randomly and without effort or provocation. What appalls him at first eventually becomes addictive to the deaths that the boys cause and how they can magically resolve the everyday problems of life. There are some amazing surprises in the movie and the screenplay is taut and flawless. Philosophical in outlook, it is a feast for the thinking person. The ambivalent feeling for religion gives a great deal of food for thought especially since our hero appears in places of worship on many occasions. The characters do not deal with staying human in a big city but rather staying human in an instable state. The fact that Colombia has been in a state of civil war for fifty years and narcotic trafficking play heavily upon the plot. The theme of the shift from the traditional and old to the modern age is powerful. The violence of the film reflects the violence of the times. Like "The Godfather", the killings are there to make a point. The subversiveness of the film, to me, at least, is what makes it so rewarding. What we have is a gay couple made up of an older man who has sex with younger boys (who do so willingly) and his younger compatriot. As the two ramble around the city, they are critical of everything in it. Alexis, the young boy, kills everyone who threatens him and Fernando. They ridicule every aspect of life--nothing is fine with them. The writer is obviously lost and there is no resolution offered. The material is rich and literary as it delves into perversions that are personal. It is a shocking and sensuous film and the brutality is honest and depicted because it is so honest. We are forced to question the daily value of life and just how much violence can be tolerated. Questioning can only make us better people. We have had the story of Colombia has been broadcast on the news to no end. There seems to be no neutralization and that is what we get from "Our Lady of the Assassins".

A Shocking Reality Check On Gang Violence...., a book and a film. Except that is not in LA or Washington DC, but in Medellin Colombia. Utilizing the local language, which makes it only more realistic, the story shows how the trafficking of illegal drugs, has corrupted all levels of society, not only on the consuming but on the producing side. It shows how with the enormous demand from the USA, there is not solution to the supply side. If it is not the Medellin cartel, then it is the Cali cartel, or whatever other city, or country, that discovers the trade, and exploits while it lasts. The drug traffickers and money launderers have worked hard at exterminating themselves from within, and without, but new sources will always erupt as the new users are always and also erupting. Extraordinary book, magnificent movie because the story is so horrendous: if it were not so real, it would not be believable. If it were not so well narrated, the book would read as a non- fiction expose, or the movie be seen as a documentary. It is both, but also fiction, but also so true.

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

Desenfadado, voraz y con una prosa que da gusto. No se pierdan la película Our Lady of the Assassins by David Ehrenstein.