Ceremonia
Felipe Restrepo Pombo
FICTION | 2021 | 272 pages
Arturo Ibarra is a landowner who has made a fortune through coal mining. As time goes on and Santa María, the place where he lives, starts to be ravaged by violence, he kicks his wife and three kids out from that rural world where they were raised by tutors in order to fund private armies and give his sexual debauchery with young women full rein. The Ibarra family builds a dynasty far from that hacienda and, with that money, manage to build alliances with bilingual schools and clubs, finding a place where they can thrive in that small society. The wedding of the oldest Ibarra granddaughter—his son Enrique's daughter—to a politician will unleash a sort of terrible fresco of contempt, antipathy, selfishness, and the triumph of those who seem like a family even when they aren’t. However, it also vindicates those who are prisoners to a destiny and manage to escape that fate at the risk of becoming marginalized. This exploration of sexuality, desire, and the terrible loneliness of those crystal palaces that are foreign to most people all meet in an extraordinarily well-narrated second novel by Felipe Restrepo.
RIGHTS: spanish PLANETA
“I like the fierceness that emerges from his texts. To the point that when I finish reading, I have the feeling that I just left a battlefield.”
“His prose is beautifully disquieting and goes after literature’s ultimate goal: it explores what we are.”
“He has a talent that is rare among contemporary writers, he produces stories that are at once fascinating and always relevant.”
“The themes in Ceremonia resonate with the present and past of this country’s elite. Because Restrepo Pombo’s work deals with this a lot. It confronts and looks itself in the mirror deeply—even if the only thing that comes back is an abyss—and takes a look at what happens from there.”
“This will be a book for posterity. Anyone who wants to know what the Latin American aristocracies and family clans were like will be able to find a descriptive treasure here.”
“Restrepo Pombo has worked hard for the recognition he has now gained as one of the greatest chroniclers of our country and Latin America (…) Ceremonia not only draws on the moral opacity of many of the upper-class families in Latin America, but it also remembers that empires built on money and not a moral compass will result merely in imperceptible, barely-remembered ruins.”
“In Ceremonia, the threads of that suffocating web that has been produced by ancestral machismo, the intricate game of social appearances, hidden sexuality, the obsessive accumulation of objects, and, above all, the sacrificing of true identity as an indispensable ticket to enter the club of the privileged are described with the minute detail of one who has observed them close-up.”
“The world of high-society Bogota, with its cryptic language and assumptions and small evils, is what Restrepo Pombo has depicted in his second novel, Ceremonia.”
“Ceremonia immerses the reader in the excesses, dalliances, and fragilities of the high class. With the audacity of New Journalism and the exploration of the human condition of a realist novel, Felipe Restrepo Pombo solidifies his position as a benchmark of contemporary fiction in Latin America.”
“Felipe Restrepo Pombo’s second novel joins the series of great titles of Hispanic literature.”
“Ceremonia is one of the best novels I’ve read recently.”
“Every family has a skeleton, or more, in their closet. Some of them are innocuous, but others—the ones that carry guilt and atonement—can be devastating. That’s what Ceremonia is about.”
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