Honest, open ... Unfolds vividly ... The Violence does not skimp on the details of what Colombians have had to endure over the past 70 years. If I learned anything by reading this book, it is that Colombians are a resilient people. Survival and optimism is the only truth they know ... Ramírez soars gracefully where other writers might have struggled to interest outsiders in another family’s history.
Fruesome details are fortunately contained to a few chapters. The author focuses more on drawing a portrait of her maternal grandparents, and how they survived this horrific time ... As Ramírez reconstructs past episodes, she has trouble maintaining a steady tone. She can get bogged down in numbers...and use terms that don’t always fit their historical period. It is when she turns to her grandmother’s betrayal by her grandfather that she’s most confident. This is her story to tell ... As a stylist, Ramírez is less sure, alternating between the sort of serviceable prose that keeps a narrative moving but can fall flat, and wispy metaphors and poetic musings ... A brave book.
Engaging ... On its own, such material would be unrelentingly grim, but Ramírez makes her book almost novelistic, edifying and consistently entertaining ... Despite writing such an intimate family history, Ramírez doesn’t get distracted by sentimentality ... Ramírez approaches it almost as if she was talking about the history of Colombia as a whole.
An eminently readable and beautifully written book ... Ramírez’s exposition is careful and explicit without being gratuitous. This search for meaning and transcendence will have particular resonance as the Trump administration escalates tensions in the region.
Drenching the family narrative with the frail complexities of love and memory, Ramírez decouples it from Colombia’s relentless and stereotypical violence to claim her own piece of its story ... A sensitive literary endeavor to honor a delicate, devastating past.
