A book a day: Karina Sainz Burgo: The third country

Original Language: castellano

Year of publication: 2021

Valoración: Between recommended and okay

The third country It is a cemetery, an allegal field located in some border area, perhaps between Colombia and Venezuela, and managed by Visitationa black woman who collects and buries to corpses of the nearby towns, bodies of unknown or without means to pay an official burial. They arrive at the place Anguish And her husband, fleeing like so many others from an epidemic of plague and carrying with her two newborn and freshly dead children, whose coffins are two shoe boxes.

All this rawness will accompany us without respite during the almost three hundred pages of this volume through inhospitable and dusty lands where the heat is a curse and where the most abject characters and the lowest impulses of the human being, the most abject, Ignorance, fear, indifference, blood cravings. Only Visitation He maintains dignity and attachment to life in his strange redoubt, without knowing his reasons or his history.

The rhythm of the narration is of overwhelming regularity, with very short chapters that give it a certain film air and make it addictive, although sometimes some winks that want to sound to García Márquez and changes of perspective not quite justified. But fundamentally what the author does not want to lose dramatic drive, adding horrors with precision of surgeon: rapes, fierce dogs, fires, threats, disappearances and a lot of blood, violence as vice, fun, as a way of life.

Certainly the book is very well written, responds to a clear pattern and complies with Rajataba without a vacuum and with total efficiency. Also the characters, at least the main ones, are well defined, although in my opinion they have rather shallow depth, moreover, with the passage of the pages they begin to fall somewhat in the stereotype. And on this same path comes my main criticism: it gives me that so much crudeness in all its variants, so many characters so markedly despicable, the brutal tone, almost apocalyptic, when describing that world, is not leading the narration by the path of the effectiveness?

It is an impression that only arises when reading is quite advanced, but it seems inevitable, because everything, characters, situations, environment, prose, seem to be at the service of an objective, which is none other than looking for the greatest impact, leaving the reader without breath and submerged in the vitiated and cruel atmosphere of those places of the mountains infested with evil, poverty and violence. Without folds or tour, the narrative is sustained by itself in that hostile medium and only in it, and what began looking like an interesting approach to the great Latin American literature becomes something different, a very well done product, of course, yes, powerful and built with skill, but something that the same approaches the mere entertainment.