Björn recenserade Prayers for the stolen av Jennifer Clement
None
5 stjärnor
Ladydi García Martínez lives in the sort of backwater jungle town where nobody has daughters. Not because of some weird Marquezian curse, but simply because it's no place for girls. The boys can learn to be drug mules or sneak into the US to work as gardeners; girls, from the moment they stop being children, are prey. The ground around her village is riddled with holes where girls run to hide any time SUVs with armed men roll into town. Beauty tips involve ruining your skin, hiding your figure, fucking up your teeth to bring down the market value to the point where you're not worth kidnapping. The herbicides regularly dropped over the town - rather than the well-guarded poppy fields a few miles outside - by the military help somewhat. But never completely. Her best friend fails to hide in time and is taken away, returns years later, her …
Ladydi García Martínez lives in the sort of backwater jungle town where nobody has daughters. Not because of some weird Marquezian curse, but simply because it's no place for girls. The boys can learn to be drug mules or sneak into the US to work as gardeners; girls, from the moment they stop being children, are prey. The ground around her village is riddled with holes where girls run to hide any time SUVs with armed men roll into town. Beauty tips involve ruining your skin, hiding your figure, fucking up your teeth to bring down the market value to the point where you're not worth kidnapping. The herbicides regularly dropped over the town - rather than the well-guarded poppy fields a few miles outside - by the military help somewhat. But never completely. Her best friend fails to hide in time and is taken away, returns years later, her eyes empty and her body full of cigarette burns. Her father disappears into the US, leaving Ladydi with her increasingly alcoholic mother and a few other surprises. It's all basically the rapey bits of Bolaño's 2666 without the narrative distance. Where to go from here?
All in all, it's a way to grow up.
I'm not being facetious. Ladydi gets to narrate all this from childhood to... whatever is the result. She knows this isn't the way people are supposed to live; after all this is the 21st century, there's a satellite dish on every house, and her mother spends her days getting drunk in front of Oprah, US TV series and the History Channel. (She named Ladydi for Diana, not out of admiration for England's Rose, but to prepare her for the fact that men will use her.) It's an ugly, unflinching, desperately sad story, no less so for being largely based on real life. And yet Clement has Ladydi narrate all this in the only way she can, with all the detail and wonder that even a tragic life deserves. The beauty of Prayers For The Stolen - and it is a beautiful book - isn't the kind that excuses atrocities or uses them for some cheap feelgood epiphany about triumph in the face of yada yada, but simply to enhance and cling to whatever there is. Stories like this tend to always be about endings; either a tacked-on happy one, or a grim martyr one. We focus too much on beginnings and endings. This novel isn't about either of those. It just is, as horriffic as it is.