Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Women in top multinational managerial posts have enormous balls..





I read Pérez-Reverte's "The Queen of the South" in a finca not far from (Santa Fé de) Bogotá, in a very comfortable four-poster bed in the sanctuary-room to an Abuela who's history is mixed up with Colombia's political history. Many old black and white photos on the room walls show a tale of family pride and achievement. Among others, a picture of a State banquet in honour of an Argentinean visitor where alongside a Cardinal, the Grandmother, and both Presidents, one can see Evita herself...

Jet-lagged induced early morning insomnia enabled me to read 'La Reina del Sur' in three successive installments. I finished it while enduring a reasonably sustained hangover, after a celebratory night at "Andrès Carne de Rès", the "in" "it" place, the hip, more-cool-than-this-and-you're-dead, restaurant cum salsa bar of Great Bogotá. The book is indeed, as quoted in the front, "Le Carré meets Garcia Marquez". It's becoming self-evident that the Narco-novel is the new cold war thriller. Le Carré himself got there first (with its international arms trade sub-species, "The Night Manager"). The ideological baddies who never came in from the Cold no longer make us tremble or shiver, their near-humane executions seem tame by comparison with "clean slate" narco-massacres.. But, wait a minute, it's not this depiction of the hyper-violent world of the global drugs trade in the same dubious league of hyper-gory cinema? It doesn't matter how talented the writer (or director) is, neither how effective is the plot (or film script) nor how powerful the characters/actors' performance can be, the end result, very unfortunately, is the glorification of criminal sociopaths. I read somewhere that Brando at first didn't want to do "The Godfather" because he refused to get into what could be taken as a glorification of the Mafia. See what happened in the end. I know that the highly complex and corrupted world of drugs is such a tempting canvass for today's thriller writer but the trend to glorify either cold-murderers (gang lords or drug barons) or serial killers (engaged or not in cannibalism) is worrisome. I'm not trying to make a moral point here, merely a psycho-physiological one, of unknown consequences: the fact remains that the trigger-level of revulsion in the face of violent imagery or behaviour has been steadily rising in the last decades. A typical symptom of addiction, in fact. The dose has to be increasingly larger in order to induce the same response. The book is good, though. And the Colombians in the plot are almost non-existent, which is a good thing. Colombia must have one of the worst instant-recognition reputations attached to the naming of a country. How unfair when one visits the charming streets of the Candelaria, talks with gentle Colombians with a glass of Rum Viejo in one's hand, and stares in awe at Cartagena's balconies...