Way Far Away

December 18, 2023
Rosero follows up Toño the Infallible with a potent fever dream about an old man named Jeremías Andrade whose yearslong search for his missing granddaughter, Rosaura, takes him to a strange town in the Andes. The locale is ominous: the atmosphere is blanketed by mist and the streets are strewn with fossilized mice that crunch when Jeremías walks down the street. The residents of the sparsely populated town utter warnings: the landlady at the hotel where Jeremías stays tells him to “beware of the nightmares”; a man sleeping on the steps of the church tells him “it’s best to turn back”; and a blind woman explains that the mice “come from every corner of the globe to die here.” Jeremías’s quest culminates in a nightmarish descent into the “faraway place,” where he’s been told his granddaughter might be found. Rosero sidesteps straightforward answers and resolution in favor of uneasy vibes. The story’s most memorable quality is how effectively he renders Jeremías’s solitude and desperation: “all these years, he thought, Rosaura had been the only thing separating him from death.” This novella packs a powerful punch.

December 15, 2023
An elderly man in search of his missing granddaughter travels to a bizarre town. The latest book from Colombian author Rosero to be published in English is a novella, spanning fewer than 100 pages--but it packs in a whole lot of dread and horror. The story opens with 70-year-old Jerem�as Andrade being shown his room by a hotel landlady; it's "a sort of coffin" adorned only by "a single, lopsided painting: the face of Jesus Christ, pale and bloodied, with one eye faded by the damp. Exactly like Christ winking at you." The landlady warns him to "beware of the nightmares," and her ominous statement proves prescient. The Andean town seems cursed, blanketed in mist and covered with mouse carcasses. Jerem�as encounters a variety of townspeople, mostly unfriendly, including a child kicking what appears to be the severed head of an old woman and a blind woman who says, "Those disgusting mice come from every corner of the globe to die here, this is the town of mice, the only town on Earth where all the world's mice come to die, the only one. Have you come here to die as well?" Jerem�as eventually reveals that he's come in search of his missing 9-year-old granddaughter, Rosaura; he's advised to look for her in "the losing place": "Do not call out to one who cannot hear you. Go and look for her in silence." Rosero's prose, as translated by McLean and Meadowcroft, is straightforward and unshowy, which renders the undercurrent of horror all the more effective. His portrait of a town without pity, populated by residents who range from odd to demonic, is excellent, while the dialogue is unexpected and, at times, terrifying. This is an unrelentingly dark book; readers with a taste for the unsettling will find much to admire. Somewhat subtle but undeniably disquieting.

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