La frontera encantada
Giuseppe Caputo
FICTION | 2025 | 328 pages
In Barranquilla, a child is split in two by his grandmother. “One side of your face is elegant and the other is vulgar,” she tells him in front of a mirror as she traces a line from his forehead to his mouth, conjuring a kind of social spell. Although she tries for the child’s “distinguished” side to shine at all costs, the house sinks into an ever-growing economic crisis: a bankruptcy that causes the father’s mental breakdown and reveals the humble origins the grandmother insists on hiding.
La frontera encantada is the life story that follows after that fundamental incident. It is the profound, disembodied, and endearing exploration of the narrator’s meanderings as the spell grows and begins to manifest in love, sex, and friendship. And above all, it’s the story of the enormous effort that he makes to rebuild a sense of freedom and protection through the joy of the body. Like “a thousand and one coastal nights,” this novel delicately oscillates between fiction, essay, archive, and fantasy. Like a long fairy tale, it condenses the aesthetic and political proposal of Giuseppe Caputo: one of Colombia’s most extraordinary and sensitive authors.
RIGHTS: spanish LITERATURA RANDOM HOUSE
“Few books leave me speechless. Nothing I could say would add up to the healing experience that was reading this novel. Bold, poetic, violent, loving: this is the story of a common wound, and, therefore, of collective consolation. I hope it becomes mandatory reading in Colombian schools. I hope that those of us who have the privilege of entering it know how to honor this gift given to us by an author who is constantly more elevated when it comes to his thinking, perspective, and language. Bravo! Standing ovation for Giuseppe Caputo.”
“Giuseppe Caputo writes about the most intimate bonds and urban loneliness like an adventurer in new worlds in search of his own language to narrate the present. He is a poet and a narrator of tenderness and sordidness: I admire him deeply.”
“For Caputo, cruelty and beauty are not antonyms but rather the two sides of the same blade of writing that is devastating and subtle, delicate and immense, intimate and social. This story is terribly beautiful: Caputo writes without Manichaeisms, with precision and responsibility, in a sort of complete writing.”
“I loved the way the character’s growth and departures intertwine with such an explicit and profound philosophical and political reflection on the social life of the face, on affections and friendship, on the twists and turns of desire and the pleasure of the body as a territory inhabited by others, on the joy of sex, on queerness. (...) A wonderful, lucid, profound, celebratory, and at the same time devastating dissonance emerges from this tension between affection, tenderness, humor, pleasure, surprise and oppression, injury and alienation. (...) I laughed, I was moved, I celebrated.”
“La frontera encantada is a novel filled with joy, whose language permanently disobeys like a meddlesome child and at the same time tears apart the stately customs of conservative Colombian classism and the dead forms of the aesthetics of Latin American defeat. The narrator explores his body as a map of history and history as a territory of his body, as he pursues the sorcery of pleasure, whose shadow slips between the oppressive love of the family and the normative violence of patriarchy, often embedded in the very psyche of homosexual desire. Trauma here leads not to complaint, but to rage as a form of generosity and, more surprisingly, to tenderness. There is an ajiaco (stew) of happy tones that demonstrate Caputo’s potency as a reader and his iconoclasm as a novelist, from the sassiness of the classic picaresque to the resentful politics of postmodernity. The Caribbean, in its splendid coastal variant, does not appear in this novel as a mortifying folkloric charm, but as what it truly is: the dynasty of rhythm as a way of organizing life.”
““In this book of extraordinary beauty, Caputo proposes a dialectical movement to the reader: ‘after telling the story of the wound,’ he says, it is necessary to ‘tell the story of desire.’ And so, he proposes the power of fiction as not only a way to understand the human experience of pain, but also to translate that experience into a political act through acceptance of the fact that on both sides of pain there has also been desire. (...) To the reader, I would like to say that due to the beauty and luminosity of this work by Caputo, due to its rebelliousness and strangeness, La frontera encantada is, in this moment of profound political and social division, an urgent novel.”
“I read La frontera encantada as a border novel in which one story calls to another in a flow between literary genres that is capable, all at once and in a beautiful way, of narrating, reflecting, imaginating, theorizing, and poeticizing.”
“This book is a crossing of narrative paths, a sweet crossroads in which memory, fiction, fantasy, essay, poetic prose, and marvelous tale meet—not to charge and confront each other, but rather to embrace and merge together with care...La frontera encantada proposes a reflection on social classes, on the way the gazes of others sculpt our self-perception, on the different setbacks of desire, on the magic of friendship, and on the reckless rebellion of queer joy.”
“Fragment, poetic narration, analysis, illustration (...) with these, the author continues to redefine not only the form of the novel, but also literature itself in this day and in our territory.”
“What a beautiful experience—one that is at times very sordid, but also so hilariously funny. I laughed so hard, felt so much, and, above all, was amazed at the honesty in this novel. This book opens up a rich avenue of exploration between autobiography, essay, and fantasy. Caputo draws on the best traditions of queer literature and leads it to fertile grounds where we can glimpse into writing from the future. This is pure reading bliss—the supreme guaguancó, a piñata of bacanería, the pure wisdom that comes from the caverns of pleasure, the rebellion of the Caribbean, the ability to transmute pain into love.”
“I don’t like to use the word honesty when talking about literature given that language is an artifice, and so, to talk about this book by Giuseppe Caputo, I will instead highlight a very vivid pain and a vital search that desires to go beyond individual wounds in a search for emancipation, which is always collective. The protagonist’s split face is such a powerful metaphor. And this is such a magnificent exploration of our class complexes and self-hatred, as well as of the potential joyous routes we can take on our way out. A very wise and very beautiful book.”
“In this novel by Giuseppe, as in his previous ones, there is a profound love of the strange and the unexpectedly beautiful. But there is also a love of language itself. The narrator arranges and creates new ideas from his past with delightful artistry, confronting fear and pain without poeticizing the fractures, but rather masterfully crafting words, phrases, and images. It is a beautiful and joyful book.”
“Tender and brutal.”
“To the reader, I would like to say that due to the beauty and luminosity of this work by Caputo, due to its rebelliousness and strangeness, La frontera encantada is, in this moment of profound political and social division, an urgent novel. Urgent because today, capitalism is showing its most ferocious face: that of extermination due to difference, that of extermination for refusing to be complacent with the established economic model, that of extermination due to the struggle for basic human rights. In this context, La frontera encantada demonstrates how to exercise a form of agency that, while affirming individual life, also accompanies and safeguards collective life in all its power.”
“I read La frontera encantada as a threshold novel in which one story calls to another, in a flow between literary genres that is capable of narrating, reflecting, imagining, theorizing, and poeticizing all at once, and of doing so beautifully. (...) In its great generosity, La frontera encantada invites us to sing with it; it gives us the gift of that vision, the aspiration of a new desire.”
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