Lo llamaré amor
Pedro Lemus

NOVEL | 2023 | 164 pages

“I like a look of Agony, because I know it's true." Pedro Carlos Lemus's beautiful novel reminds us of this verse by Emily Dickinson, because it's about a young man who is well-versed in sadness. His parents—flawed, like everyone—immersed him in a sea of abandonment, frustration, and spite from early on. And there—like the soap opera heroines he loves and the lyrics of the songs that hurt and healed and hurt him—he learned how to swim freely and with dignity. That is also how he learned how to fall in love: with that marvelous ability to retreat before a hit. The young man he loved abandoned him too, although perhaps he wouldn't put it that way. He would put it in a way that was more suggestive, and, therefore, more painful.

To find poetry in suffering, in opacity, in incomprehension, in the melancholy observation of the fabled "completeness" of others, is one of this novel's greatest merits. Like someone who slowly dissects himself in order to study his own fragility and later translate it into images that are as beautiful as they are unforgiving, Lo llamaré amor offers a sophisticated and scandalously moving perspective.

—Margarita García Robayo

RIGHTS: spanish PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE

“In this beautiful novel, Pedro reminds us that herds are formed through the mutual licking of wounds. That the possibility of rebuilding affections still exists between children and single women.”
— Vanessa Londoño
“Using heartbreak as an excuse, Pedro Carlos Lemus, a writer from Barranquilla, takes on the responsibility of transforming words into intimacy, and into that mysticism that comprises the interest in an unrequited love.”
— Jesús Bovea, El Heraldo
“Lo llamaré amor puts the magnifying glass on relationships with parents and loved ones. It puts an emphasis those bonds that constitute us.”
— El Colombiano
“In Lo llamaré amor, Lemus, through Pedro (who could easily be his alter ego), begins with a separation in order to tell a double story, or, better yet, to explore the concave and convex side of human relationships—abandonment and protection, renouncement and envelopment—with an incredible capacity to manage emotional distances. This might be the book’s greatest virtue: the way it brings readers close and then pushes them away, putting us in the difficult space of what is suggested.”
— Emiliano Monge, El País