I didn't even want to put La novia oscura on the reading list for my qualifying exams. I'd bought it in the Tijuana Costco not long after it released and I never could manage to finish it. The narrator/author presence should have perhaps been reconsidered; she is annoying to me in the same way lettered collaborators of testimonio who can't keep themselves out of their subjects' narratives are. Her scrappy little prostitute protagonist has been seen before and is such a composite literary and media clichés that I find it hard to buy into, let alone identify with her. I'd usually call this sort of imitation "a delicious intertextuality"; but here, Restrepo mentions Naná and her literary lineage as though someone were holding a gun to her head demanding that she do so. The telenovelesque coincidental meetings among characters and instances of magic realism that I normally appreciate (or that I'm willing to forgive, especially in a Colombian author's work) just fell flat. But today as I read, one of the characters took as a good omen the fact the number of an oil rig, 29, was the anniversary of his mother's death...
I didn't even want to run yesterday, but not far into the first song, I found this. It was a day to especially honor her memory. Yet, as she often does (and through unexpected vías), she sent what I probably most needed...¡gracias, Mamá!
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