Striking ... What adds even more substance to this personal story is that the book radiates out into such issues as the collision between the Old World and the New, pitting Indigenous spirituality against institutionalized religion, and their differing approaches to medicine ... Readers expecting a conventional memoir will either be unconvinced by Rojas Contreras’ circular storytelling and the forthright presentation of the fantastical as fact, or they’ll find it appealing because such an unusual story demands a distinctive narrative approach ... Beautifully written and layered, an empowering act of recovery and self-discovery.
To complete The Man Who Could Move Clouds...Rojas Contreras relies...on oral history, ultimately embracing its messy, unverifiable and disjointed nature ... These are the kinds of stories that would’ve had Gabriel García Márquez rubbing his hands together ... Sections in the memoir that expand beyond the personal into discussions of colonialism and Colombian history can feel thin. Some reflections are vague, airy, even bordering on cringe ... Others get simple facts wrong ... For a book that reveals such deep collective truths, these are merely quibbles ... Rojas Contreras has forced into the public record a collective identity of clairvoyants and spiritualists...that she has pieced together from the disintegrating fragments of her own familial past. In the process, she has written a spellbinding and genre-defying ancestral history.
With Latin flavor infusing her phrasing and magic in her heritage, Rojas Contreras recalls her childhood in the conflicted, politically scarred homeland of Colombia ... veers from chronology to speculation, from the realities of constant political upheaval to poignant candle-lit moments with Mami in the attic, listening to her mother’s sage advice about how to guide people to solutions by weaving complex, magical fables for them to follow. Her path, one senses, is still multilayered ... Those who read this book for the conceptions and comforts hidden beyond bare facts will find themselves soaring into imagination with Rojas Contreras and hoping for further visualizations from this gifted artist.
The accounts in The Man Who Could Move Clouds come directly from the mouths of those who saw Sojaila appear in two places at once or witnessed Nono moving clouds. This approach to the factual reveals a fidelity to Rojas Contreras’s upbringing in a house crowded with her mother’s fortune-telling clientele that celebrated the unexplainable and surreal ... The book also speaks to the near-constant violence in Colombia and the national amnesia that has accompanied it. Beyond a family history, The Man Who Could Move Clouds is about the ways in which this violence can take root in the body ... Rojas Contreras presents her own family history to probe greater questions of who gets to be remembered and how. Using philosophical and startlingly delicate prose, Rojas Contreras spins colonial history, personal narrative and the magical around the axis of her family story. The reader feels their soft rotation, like planets around a sun.
A magnificent, mesmerizing novel ... History, though important scenery and groundwork, adds shading to the compelling primary story. It strikes the heart, especially today: reflecting upon our own national histories and narratives, what they mirror, and how so many are committed to denying them, erasing them.
A lyrical meditation ... Mesmerizing ... Rojas Contreras affectingly reveals how darkness can only be vanquished when it’s brought to the light. Fusing the personal and political, this rings out as a bold case against forgetting in a forward-facing age.
Strongest of all are sections in which Rojas Contreras plays on the theme of amnesia to note that it pertains as much to willful maltreatment on the part of a country’s oppressors...as to individuals saddled with a medical affliction, calamities endured through no fault of the victims ... A moving depiction of family and the power of healing.
