Novel
La virgen de los sicarios
Not translated into English
Fernando Vallejo · 1994
Synopsis
A fifty-year-old man, a grammarian, returns to Medellín to die after decades of absence. He is introduced to Alexis, sixteen, an unemployed hired killer who carries a pistol and reads nothing. They settle together and roam the city: the churches where the old man prays to the Virgin, the streets where the boy shoots down without a thought those who displease him, a driver, a neighbour, a passer-by who is too noisy. The narrator comments, corrects the sicarios' language, and wonders how far he will go behind him.
Context
Written in Mexico City and published in 1994, after five autobiographical volumes that had not crossed borders. The book appeared just as Medellín was emerging from the years of the cartel war. Its author himself wrote the screenplay of the film that a Swiss director made from it six years later. The French translation came three years after the original, from the publisher who had already issued one of his autobiographical books, and was reissued in paperback two years later.
Who it is for
One hundred and fifty pages in Spanish, translated into French. A long tirade without chapters, often violent and often funny; the narrator himself comments on the slang of the sicarios.
Prizes and reception
The book that made its author known outside Colombia, translated into several languages and adapted for the cinema by Barbet Schroeder in 2000.