Andrés Felipe Solano

GRANTA 113: THE BEST OF YOUNG SPANISH-LANGUAGE NOVELISTS

The Cuervo Brothers, an excerpt from a novel by Andres Felipe Solano, captures a crucial passage of a boy’s life in the world of an upper middle class private school in Bogota. The Cuervo brothers, two orphans who live with their rich, influential grandmother become the object of outlandish stories told by their classmates. The boys were said to have escaped an orphanage through a drainage pipe. They were orphans, their classmates said, because their father killed their mother and was now in the Island prison of Gorgona. The father had killed his wife because she’d led a double life as a high class hooker.

The story starts with the plural voice of the group – the ‘we’ of gossip – and narrows to a slender, earnest subjectivity. One of the gossiping schoolboys has a withered leg from polio; the older orphan brother is so brilliant he's taken around to display as a living calculator, to schools and community groups. When the boys become seriously involved with girls, one by one, they lose interest in the orphan brothers, as boyhood mythology gives way to sex. We find one boy, left behind by the others, braving into the haunted house of the orphans, who are both outcasts and heroes.

Solano has a deft fetching touch. The narrator – the ‘we’ by this time has dwindled down to one mind, as the myth cedes ground to the real – eventually learns that the Gorgona prison was closed in 1977.

One of the many pleasures of the story, for those of us who’ve never been to Bogota and whose previous feeling for Columbia was limited to Macondo and New York Times articles about the drug lords, are the textures of the contemporary teenage life there. The boys see Alien Three, attend school in a neighbourhood where 1940s mansions are torn down and converted to car workshops, and photograph the wrecks left after the drug traffickers car bombs.

I can’t wait to read the novel. – Mona Simpson, Best Young American Novelist 1996

Each of the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists answered a questionnaire on their influences and the role of the writer in public life. Here are Solano’s answers:

Name the five writers you most admire at the moment (any period, language or genre).

If this is about romances of the moment, I’ll name a Japanese writer, Akiyuki Nosaka. I’ve only read one of his stories, ‘American Algae’– but I fall at his feet, it’s that astonishing. But as these loves are always so fleeting, I’d rather mention some authors that are always with me: Juan Carlos Onetti, Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut and Rubem Fonseca, who wrote the novels A Grande Arte (High Art) and Agosto, and the store collections Feliz Ano Novo and O Cobrador. And sorry, I know it was supposed to be five, but I can’t leave out three guys who aren’t strictly considered to be poets, but I feel that they are: Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan.

Have you published literary criticism?

Apart from a few short reviews and two or three articles on writers I like, no.

Do you have your own web page, or blog?

No. It’s already bad enough having to get out of bed in the morning, without adding to it with other silly obligations – worse still if they’re self-imposed.

Is your fiction your sole source of income? If not, what else do you live off?

I only wish it were. For the last eleven years my money has come from magazine journalism. And for the last two years I’ve edited translated Works for the Korean Literature Translation Institute.

Should writers play a role in public life beyond the publication of their work? If so, in what way?

A writer should write and that’s all. But Onetti said it better: ‘a writer will write just because; because he or she has no other option; because it’s their vice, their passion and their misfortune.’

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