The Devil Horses

The protagonist of this novel has no name. He is called +the one who gets lost among the plants1/2. We already know him from Tom&szlig s Gonz&szlig lez' earlier novels: In Horacio's story he is still a youth, one of -lvaro's sons, Jer3/4nimo Guillermo's cousin, J.'s and David's brother, and is introduced as +the one who knew something about trees1/2. In The Beginning was the Sea, he is the +relative1/2 by whom J. feels cheated of his inheritance and who ends up efficiently and heartlessly handling J.'s funeral. The novel describes how the protagonist acquires and manages a finca on the outskirts of the big city of Medellín. This cultivation - a continual expansion and enlargement of the small estate - which he and his wife Pilar run with their own hands, leads the two of them into ever greater loneliness. It is a complex, profound, mysterious novel, the character portrait of a man who - fleeing from a debt? - increasingly isolates himself from the world and allows himself to be swallowed by the vegetation he himself produces. With the finca, the protagonist creates for himself, through tireless work, a micro-paradise cut off from the polluted, greedy, violent outside world, which is at the same time a hell, because an _overabundance of beauty and perfection has something suffocating about it and because he cannot escape himself. In addition to the protagonist and his wife, several family members - including J. as a young hottie in MedellÝn and David, the author's alter ego - and many secondary characters come to life. In short, the book is the exciting, brilliantly told story of a failure within a failure, the protagonist's personal shipwreck within the decline of Colombian society (here exemplified by the city of MedellÝn).