About Valentine’s Day: some versions of love in Colombian letters

There are many ways to express love, it is known, and in Valentine’s Day many will show their talents to make that special someone understand how they feel. Details will always be at the top of the list. Giving something that the other person likes is usually not missing and, if we talk about gifts, books cannot be missing.

Readers appreciate receiving books all the time, and we appreciate it even more if it’s a special occasion and a special person. With the aim of accompanying readers in love on these dates a little, here are some titles of Colombian literature whose treatment of the theme of love, in different categories, has transcended and that we recommend as a gift to that loved one, or to tangle between the pages:

If we talk about books that portray the love of music, one of the most interesting that has been written in recent times would be “The nostalgia of the music lover”of Juan-Carlos Garay.

It is a moving novel, for those who read it in a musical tone, about the passion, the unbridled love that a person feels for music. The protagonist of this story lives in Bogotá and spends his days at the mercy of sounds, songs that move him inside and transport him to corners of his mind that he never remembered existed.

Francisco Talavera, Efe for his friends, is the owner of El Cocodrilo Discos, a store of old records and jewelry from the history of music. From the hand of this character, the reader will be able to know that almost orgasmic feeling that jazz produces, or the tears of joy that Gardel generates; the agony of Beethoven, the incomparable guitar of Eric Clapton, the poetry of Joaquín Sabina or the dreamlike state generated by listening to Edith Piaf. Talavera is in love with music, and that’s what this book is all about, where Garay has managed to say it all.

In Colombian literature, there is no other novel, story or poem that pays such beautiful homage to a city, that recounts it with as much fervor and adoration as this Antoine Caballerothe only one he wrote in his life.

In the pages of “Without Remedy”, readers will meet the poet Ignacio Escobar, who goes out to walk the streets of Bogotá, in the seventies, after his girlfriend left him for not wanting to have children with her. From then on, Escobar will frequent the nightlife of his city and will approach the poetry he has sought so much in his life.

Several times before his death, Caballero said it was a novel about poetry, but his readers argued that it was a work about Bogotá. In this order of ideas, it is a play that recounts the days of a poet in love with his city.

One of the great books of Colombian literature of the second half of the 20th century and its author’s masterpiece.

Only a bibliophile could have written such a beautiful book on the importance of books in our lives, and only a bookseller could have explained the blind love we feel for these objects. Passionate as anyone about his job and attracted by books, in his pages, the bookseller Alvaro Castillo Granada organizes the world according to the stories we read and make up.

“Bookworm” It’s a tribute, an ode, a love song to books. Here, the bookseller shows, as the back cover of the title indicates, that the materiality of publications shapes intellectual activity, that the object not only contains thoughts, but also influences them, that volumes have a life of their own and establish a dialogue between them.

With agile, intelligent and entertaining prose, Álvaro Castillo Granada exposes in these pages how second-hand books, the object that we often take for granted, are the guiding axis of our existence. Libraries, signed copies, untraceable editions, whimsical titles, endearing writers and booksellers are the coordinates that guide this universe.

This is probably one of the best-known stories in Colombian literature today, that of the writer Hector Abad Faciolince and his father.

In “The Oblivion That We Will Be”title adapted to the cinema by Fernando Trueba, the reader attends a true lesson of love of a son towards his father. When it’s not admiration, it’s idolatry and here is his reconstructed story.

Hector Abad Gomez He devoted the last years of his life, until the night he was assassinated in the heart of Medellín, to the defense of human rights. His son brings him into the story of this book as a loving, patient, and caring character. The story also ends up being the memory of a city, a family and a melancholic evocation of childhood.

I don’t think there is much to say about this book. It is one of the most relevant works of Gabriel Garcia Marquezafter “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.

In nearly 500 pages, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, tells the love story between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, in a small port town in the Caribbean, for more than sixty years. The obstacles presented to them only confirm one of the most powerful ideas, which is love, not death, which has no limits.