Noticia de un secuestro and Memory.
A.
1. 'Una vez más el cultivoa patrio - la cuadruple C de Comlobia: café, cocaína, ciclismo y Cien años de soledad - se empeña en hacer del cuento el coto privado de temas manidos, plagados de lugares comunes, y de una serie de tópicos que pretenden entronizar la imagen más socorrida del país: telurismo obsesivo, tropicalismo anémico y sentimental, urbe depauperada y demagógica, y un vasto repretorio de asuntos recreados en un contexto donde abunden las vacas y los campamentos bombardeados, así como infinitas redes de ríos odiseos y volcanes más furiosos que el Vesubio.'
2. 'falta un serio criterio analítico... impide que la narrativa posterior a GM haya sido estudiada a la luz de su auténtica dimensión. El antólogo o crítico de turno se deja ir en especulaciones que sólo ponen de presente su gusto particular, tan discutible como vehemente y parcial es su enfoque. Y hasta el presente... sigue anclado en los ámbitos del Realismo mágico, en la crónica testimonial y panfletaria, en el regodeo autobigráfico y en la superchería ideológica." From R.H. Moreno-Durán, 'La narrativa colombiana ante el final del Milenio'.
3. Back cover of Louis de Bernieres, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord: FT review - 'Sharp, funny, engaging and British... de Bernieres is doing for Colombia's drug culture what Tom Sharpe did for apartheid. His approach is flippant, but the purpose behind it is deadly serious.' From Scotland on Sunday - 'Vibrant, lucid, charged with wild jokes and harrowing scenes smelted with torture... a book which shudders with memorability... satirical and splendid.'
4. Review of Noticia: 'La historia, sin duda, pone en cuestión las teorías de lo maravilloso americano e invita a otra lectura de aquello que designamos como realidad'.
5. 'GM dedica su libro a los inocentes como a los culpables. Es, como él mismo afirma, sólo un episodio del holocausto bíblico en que Colombia se consume desde hace más de 20 años. Su mirada sobre esos 6 meses de terror contribuye al escalrecimiento de los hechos y quizá remueva la conciencia de un país desmemoriado, condenado al olvido y la soledad.'
B. From Benjamin, Theses...
II Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly coloured by the time to which the course of our existence has assigned us... The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history... There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.
III A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past...
V The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again... every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.
VI To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was'. It means to seize hold of a meory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.
VII There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.
IX The storm is what we call progress....
XIV History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. (See also 'Time/History/Memory' as presented in final sections - compare with I).
C. Framing the Novel
1. How is the story and story telling framed?
Criticism, reviews (description, theory, evaluation), paratexts.
2. How is history and historiography framed?
Attitude to truth, fiction and their interrelationship. Who has the authority to
make history?
3. Intertextuality, hypotextuality and hypertextuality.
4. Myth and Metanarrative.
5. The ethics of storytelling.