Pilar Quintana’s novel, set between Colombia and nature

Born in Cali in 1972, she was selected back in 2007 as one of the 30 most promising Latin American writers under the age of 39, and after winning the prestigious Alfaguara Novel Prize in 2021, Pilar Quintana is receiving the IILA-Literature Prize from the Italian-Latin American Institute in Rome for her novel "Los abismos", published in Italian in 2023 under the title "Gli abissi" by La tartaruga (320 pp., €20.00), just as her latest book "Notte nera" is being published in Italian (La tartaruga, 224 pp., €20.00). “An original voice capable of exploring the female condition and family dynamics with sensitivity” is the jury’s praise for a novel whose protagonist is an eight-year-old girl grappling with the upheavals in her family. But her latest novel returns to a classic theme of American literature, through the story of four days in the life of Rosa, a woman alone in the Amazon rainforest. “I lived in the jungle for nine years, so it was inevitable that I would write about the jungle,” she explains. The Italian presentation of the book draws comparisons with Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but for anyone with even a passing familiarity with Colombian literature, it is hard not to think immediately of La voragine. The novel, published by Eustasio Rivera in 1924, whose protagonists ultimately vanish into the jungle. “The jungle swallowed them up” is the famous closing line. “Of course. There’s a whole tradition of Latin American and Colombian novels set in the jungle. Except that, in Rivera’s work as in others, these are men’s adventures. This, however, is the adventure of a woman, who, like a man, puts on her boots and grabs her machete to face the elements, but must also tackle challenges specific to her gender, given that she is harassed by some male neighbours. And not only does she set off on an adventure, but she also has to do the washing, cleaning, cooking and washing up. It’s a question that sometimes springs to mind in these stories, whether in literature or cinema, where men set off on adventures always wearing the same clothes. Haven’t they washed them? What do they eat? Who prepared the food? Here we have a jungle adventure featuring a character who is an expert in nature and the outdoors, yet is also engaged in the little household chores that help keep the world turning.”

It is a very powerful metaphor, which has its roots to some extent in ‘Facundo, or Civilisation and Barbarism’ by the Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, where it is observed how the vast expanse of nature in the Americas can transform and even turn savage the European who is swallowed up by it. It is a recurring theme found in many of Jorge Luis Borges’s stories, most notably ‘The Gospel According to Mark’. The motif also surfaces in the United States, from Lovecraft to films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes. By contrast, the magical realism of Miguel Ángel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel García Márquez inverts this relationship with vast nature, casting it in a positive light. “Yes, there are countless sources of inspiration, which we might perhaps summarise in a single idea: I wanted to explore what happens to human beings when they find themselves in nature. What happens to human beings when we remove them from society, from the city, and leave them in the natural world? Perhaps one answer is to challenge our notion of feeling separate from nature, and to understand ourselves not only as part of nature, but as nature itself.” But ultimately, is it a threat, an opportunity, or could it be both? “I believe it’s both. Rosa lives with the threat, but she realises that if she doesn’t unleash her violence – let’s say, the beast, the terrible animal that lives within her – the jungle will devour her. She must find her own violence, not as a negative trait, but as the positive trait that, in that environment, enables her to survive. In the city we can pretend we aren’t animals and we believe it, but in the jungle we must return to the animals we are.”

Colombian literature continues to be closely associated with Gabriel García Márquez, something which many authors find somewhat problematic. “In Colombia we have a rich and diverse literary tradition, but since García Márquez the literary establishment has indeed tended to favour a very conservative form of literature – the kind that recounted history, dealt with violence and addressed Colombia’s political reality. However, I believe that in recent years, with the growth of independent publishers, the Colombian literary scene has broadened its perspective, offering a more varied representation of our literary landscape.”