“La corriente”, the storybook of Colombian Juliana Restrepo

A Juliana Restrepo we met her as a writer in 2016, when close editorsthe label managed by Hector Abad Faciolincepublished his first work, a book of short stories which had the editorial accompaniment of the writer also Jose Ardilawho was the label’s publisher at the time.

The author of “Book of Boredom” He was able to enhance the voice of Restrepo, whom he met in a writing workshop in Medellín, and the result was that nostalgic and entertaining narrator that readers could find in the twelve stories that make up “The flow”.

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Inside these pages are all kinds of situations, such as the tensions of the upper class in Colombia and France, the nostalgia of being far from home and the friendship between the women who live their lives, between sex and intellectual growth, old age and oblivion

The stories collected here present flowing, tumultuous tales of dispersing and self-fulfilling dreams, of remembering what has been lived, of longing for what is lost. There is something that is common to all: a voice that tells from the past to the present, or vice versa. Memory becomes relevant in these stories and time is the space in which they unfold, the current in which they sail, without a fixed course, adrift.

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Sometimes the best story is not the one that tells a great feat, but the one that allows us to understand each other, by telling something extremely simple, like a visit to friends, an interesting conversation with someone on our anything, or simply, how we feel when we have that special someone near us, the one who turns our whole world upside down.

These are precisely the stories in this book, which is already seven years old since its publication. Stories like those of ‘Vol-Au-vent’, ‘Red garancières’, ‘Composition book’, ‘The promises’there ‘Tutorials’very beautiful stories that tell life as it is: what we can talk about again and again.

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In “The flow”, readers are left with the nostalgia of a narrator who aspires to be what she was before, when she lived in Paris, of a thirty-something Juliana, wanting to be twenty-five and spend her afternoons drinking wine and rum from Martinique on a balcony.

“Pledges start with a short sentence, with two words ‘It’s over.’ I almost sent you this. My whore would have been happy to send this to you, but I wrote it down and deleted it. And instead, I’m sending you this email that says I’m still here, because I’m stupid -or because of your Spanish, if you like-, that I’ll wait for you here if you decide to stop, get dressed, stop being dead like mine on the lawn and come to your south Nicolás Eme” – (p. 106 – “The flow”).

Ordinary style flows with ease. It looks like still water, but it hides a force that drags or caresses, cradles or destroys. The passing year is common, the average person, what happens daily, says the back cover. the tales of Juliana Restrepo they have something of alternating current, of magnifying glass, something that makes us come back to reading because the spark of a detail electrifies us. His stories transform the ordinary into a story with unexpected subtleties: they tell the past with the proximity of the present, the everyday with the strength of the unusual.

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