In the vast, venomous, and brilliant literary universe of Fernando Vallejo, there is no bloodier battlefield than memory. The Colombian-born, Mexican-based author is famous for his raging diatribes against the Catholic Church, the hypocrisy of society, the slaughter of animals, and even the very concept of God. But before the apocalypse of La virgen de los sicarios and the encyclopedic fury of El desbarrancadero , there was the soft, devastating glow of childhood. That glow is captured in his 1985 novel, Los días azules .
The book is a fierce indictment of time. Vallejo suggests that the only true home we have is the past, and the past is a country that expels us the moment we are born. To read Los días azules is to feel the author’s desperation as he tries to pin those blue days to the page before they fade to gray. Los días azules is not a book for those seeking a traditional story. It is a book for those who understand that literature is sometimes a cry against entropy. Fernando Vallejo would later become famous for his misanthropy, but in these pages, we see the wound that caused the misanthropy: the loss of a world so perfect it could only exist in memory. los dias azules fernando vallejo
It is a novel about heaven, written from the depths of hell. It is blue—the color of the infinite sky, but also the color of a corpse’s lips. Read it slowly. Let the prose wash over you. And when you finish, you will understand why Vallejo spends the rest of his career screaming: he once had everything, and time took it all away. In the vast, venomous, and brilliant literary universe