Novel
Liveforever
¡Que viva la música!
Andrés Caicedo · 1977
Synopsis
María del Carmen Huerta, blonde and from a good family, leaves the parties of her milieu to go down into the night of Cali. She swaps English records for salsa, follows the orchestras from one neighbourhood to another, changes lovers and drugs, sleeps by day. She tells the story herself, in the present tense, to the rhythm of the tracks she listens to, and never feels sorry for herself. Each stage takes her lower and she goes on without turning back, determined to wear the city down to the end.
Context
The book appeared in Bogotá in 1977. Its author was twenty-five and held that beyond that age there was nothing left to do; he received the first copy and killed himself on the day of publication. Salsa is the very matter of the sentence, and the speech of Cali passes into it unaltered. The novel took thirty years to leave the country: it appeared in French in 2012, in a translation whose prefacer explains the semantic ghosts of the period, and in English two years later, in a series of modern classics.
Who it is for
A short novel, in Spanish, translated into several languages. The language is that of the streets of Cali in the seventies; some pages read better while listening to what they name.
Prizes and reception
It became the book of several Colombian generations, has been reissued without interruption and adapted for the stage.