City Lights Books
San Francisco, CA
2005
222 pp.
Serie universitaria
9780872864351

Queen Cocaine takes place amid the violence that rules everyday life in Colombia. In the remote Pacific Coast jungle, a region of incessant rain that is ravaged by the drug trade and by civil war, the army, the guerillas, and the drug traffickers spin a perilous web in which the three main characters who inhabit this novel are caught: Rat, a young Catalan woman who has recently arrived in Colombia; Aida, a local visionary who is adept at weaving spells, and Wilson, a writer and journalist persecuted because of his ideas and tormented by his own frustrations. Following the footsteps of a writer persecuted because of his ideas and tortured by his own frustrations, a young Catalan woman embarks on an adventure in the jungles of Colombia where her familiar world shatters and from which nothing emerges unharmed. Confronted by solitude in a region where it rains incessantly, she discovers, first in her lover, then in the people around her, the alarming signs of a devastating war. In a narrative that swings between intimacy and horror, she bears witness to a hell in which she abandons everything except the language she has had to reinvent, as her only refuge, to speak about the thousand new faces death has shown her. Nuria Amat was born in Barcelona, where she now lives.

WorldCat