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Queen Cocaine
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ISBN13: 9780872864351
Publisher: City Lights
Published: Mar 1 2005
Pages: 250
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.67 Width: 5.26 Depth: 6.96
Language: English
Following the footsteps of a writer persecuted because of his ideas and tortured by his own frustrations, a young Catalan woman embarks on an adventure in the jungles of Colombia where her familiar world shatters and from which nothing emerges unharmed.
Confronted by solitude in a region where it rains incessantly, she discovers, first in her lover, then in the people around her, the alarming signs of a devastating war. In a narrative that swings between intimacy and horror, she bears witness to a hell in which she abandons everything except the language she has had to reinvent, as her only refuge, to speak about the thousand new faces death has shown her.
. . . the Barcelona-based Catalan author brings an alien sensibility and lush, invented language to Queen Cocaine, set in Colombia's war-ravaged countryside. . . . Amat's book is a paranoid fever dream of a peasant novel--heir to those of Rulfo and Fanon, but also Lispector--filtered through the gaze of her doomed outsider.--The Village Voice
Amat deftly conjures the funereal landscape of Colombia's Pacific coast--an indifferent sea; intemperate rains; a jungle carpeted with snakes and punctuated by swamps . . . a traumatic forced evacuation of the village near the end adds gravitas to the book, which is an acute, grimly poetic account of a South American heart of darkness.--Publishers Weekly
A happy combination of intelligence and critical insight.--Juan Goytisolo, Times Literary Supplement
In all, a revelatory tale that reads like the testimony of a shell-shocked survivor.--Kirkus Reviews
[An] apocalyptic novel by Spanish writer Amat . . . A brilliant portrayal of the horrors of drug cultivation; recommended for all general collections, especially where there is an interest in Latin American culture.--Library Journal
Nuria Amat was born in Barcelona, where she now lives.
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