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Book Reviewed by:
Sara Fiore
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Introducing the Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi, You Glow in the Dark glimmers with an unearthly light and a nearly radioactive power
The seven stories of You Glow in the Dark unfold in a Latin America wrecked and poisoned by human greed, and yet Colanzi's writing—at once sleek and dense, otherworldly and intensely specific—casts an eerily bright spell over the wreckage. Some stories seem to be set in a near future; all are superbly executed and yet hard to pin down; they often leave the reader wondering: was that realistic or fantastic?
Colanzi draws power from Andean cyberpunk just as much as from classic horror writers, and this daring is matched by her energizing simultaneous use of multiplicity and fragmentation—the book's stylistic trademarks. Freely mixing worlds, she uses the Bolivian altiplano as the backdrop for an urban dystopia and blends Aymara with Spanish. Colanzi never gets bogged down; she can be brutal and direct or light-handed and subtle. Her materials are dark, but always there's the lift of her vivid sense of humor. You Glow in the Dark seizes the reader's attention (from the title on) and holds it: this is a book that announces the arrival of a major new talent.
The Greenest Eyes
She spent her tenth birthday in her mother's village. Every vacation they went back to that place in the jungle where there were no cars, just motorbikes going round and round the plaza, and huge insects that kept frying themselves on the streetlamps. Her father bought mara wood there and took it to the city to make varnished furniture. As time went by, there were more timber cutters in the jungle, and fewer mara trees, and more varnished furniture with carved swan's heads in the fancy houses. Ofelia liked the village because she was allowed to play with the neighborhood children until after midnight. Also, most of them rode motorbikes, like a gang of pizza delivery kids. The only cinema showed samurai movies, and there was an ice cream parlor on the plaza where they bought ice cream made from fruits with mysterious and resonant names: motojobobo, cacharana, pitanga, ocoró, asaí ...
On her birthday, her parents took her to dinner at The Dragon Palace, the ...
Many of the characters are trapped in their circumstances, unable to extricate themselves from isolation and poverty but increasingly desperate to do so. The lush jungles are full of bugs and diseases. Magnificent rainforests hide killer animals. Skies are described as "electric," "scandalous" rain falls, and lightning is a frequently repeated image. Places are used over and over for experimental science and dangerous technology with little regard for the people or the land. But there is often a bright spot of hope that creeps in through the cracks. In "Atomito," a town almost destroyed by a mysterious factory is driven to rise up and dismantle it. In "The Narrow Way," members of a cult kept in line by electric collars and high fences brave the shocks to escape. The most emotionally impactful story in the collection, the titular "You Glow in the Dark," is a fictionalized reimagining of a real radiological accident that occurred in Brazil in the 1980s. The stories are not always easy to understand, and plots don't always take a logical course, but the subjects Colanzi writes about don't either...continued
Full Review
(873 words)
(Reviewed by Sara Fiore).
In the title story of You Glow in the Dark, scrap metal scavengers uncover a strange glowing capsule in the ruins of an abandoned hospital. Dazzled by the beautiful blue particles that glow in the dark, they spread radioactive poison throughout their community, leaving illness and death everywhere they go. When the accident is finally contained, it takes on a religious quality, with the victims seen as saints and living miracles and the disaster itself an uncontrollable act of God.
The actual incident closely mirrored in Liliana Colanzi's story occurred in Goiania, Brazil on September 13th, 1987. Like in the story, two scavengers exploring an abandoned radiation therapy clinic discovered a capsule and took it to a scrap metal dealer ...
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