Reina de America

A Spanish scholar and librarian, Amat has written short stories, plays, and novels, including El pais del alma (The Country of the Soul, Seix Barral, 1999). Set in a remote region of Colombia, this latest work went into a second printing just five days after the first edition was launched. While grisly headlines usually accompany news related to Colombia's current conflict, Amat tells the story quietly and poetically from within. Rat, a young Catalan woman, lives with her lover, Wilson, a Colombian journalist in hiding, in an isolated coastal area without electricity or running water, exposed to the elements of the jungle and the sea pronounced rain, dense forest, mosquitoes, unrelenting heat, and humidity. While Rat is there to live out her bohemian fantasy, she has to witness, at close range, the reality of war, from U.S.-sponsored aerial fumigations to homemade guerrilla bombs. Amat's writing has a distilled quality to it; every sentence is precise. The novel is nontraditional, without quotation marks for dialog and with shifts in the narration from first person to third. As a result, the prose has a dreamlike quality, which is at times confusing but always alluring. Highly recommended for libraries and bookstores with Spanish-language literature collections. Tatiana de la Tierra, Univ. at Buffalo Lib., NY