The Man Who Could Move Clouds

February 1, 2022

Born in Bogot�, Colombia, and now based in California, Contreras made a name for herself with the LJ-starred debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree. Here she turns to nonfiction as she recalls suffering amnesia after a head injury in her twenties and seeking to uncover her family history. Her mother had suffered a similar injury as a child and emerged able to see ghosts--part of a family legacy of otherworldly connection exemplified by her own father, a famed curandero, or healer, said to talk to the dead, see the future, and move clouds. Here, the author weaves together her family history, rediscovered with her mother, and that of Colombia.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 2, 2022
Novelist Rojas Contreras (Fruit of the Drunken Tree) returns with a lyrical meditation on her family’s history and the legacy of colonialism in Colombia. Though guerrilla and drug warfare forced Rojas Contreras’s family to leave Colombia in 1998 when she was 14, the specters of their past remained present. After a bicycle accident in Chicago nine years later rendered Rojas Contreras amnesiac for eight weeks, she slowly recovered her memory with the help of her family. “They say the amnesias were a door to gifts we were supposed to have,” Rojas Contreras muses as she offers readers a gift of another kind, recounting in mesmerizing prose family stories of magic and survival, starting with that of her grandfather, Nono, a curandero who could tell the future, heal the sick, and change the weather. While his powers were passed down to his children, Rojas Contreras writes, they were diluted by the inherited traumas of Colombia’s brutal colonial history: “We were a damned people, and not by God but by white people.” In grappling with the violence embedded in her family’s DNA, Rojas Contreras affectingly reveals how darkness can only be vanquished when it’s brought to the light. Fusing the personal and political, this rings out as a bold case against forgetting in a forward-facing age.

May 15, 2022
A novelist revisits the country of her upbringing to learn her family's story. When she was 23 and living in Chicago, Colombia native Rojas Contreras endured a bout of amnesia, "just a few weeks of oblivion," when she "crashed my bicycle into an opening car door." For eight weeks, "I had no idea where I came from or where I was going, what city I was in, what my name was, and I did not even know the year." As horrifying as that episode was, she was luckier than her mother: At age 8, Mami fell down a well in Oca�a, Colombia, after she felt "a hand on the small of her back, giving her a gentle push." When she recovered eight months later, Mami had "the ability to see ghosts and hear disembodied voices," a gift her curandero (Latinx healer) father, Nono, had also possessed. In this poetic memoir, Rojas Contreras writes of the return trip she and her mother took to Colombia in 2012 to disinter Nono's bones and tell his story. As the author writes, he was a man who knew "instructions for talking to the dead, telling the future, healing the ill, and moving the clouds"--the "secrets" Mami had inherited. Though the author too often relies on platitudes--e.g., "No one is above suffering"; "Hunger shapes us into a wisdom we cannot yet know"--the book derives considerable power from both her reminiscences of growing up in a nation where guerrilla groups and paramilitaries left bombs throughout Bogot� and its portrait of a loving family filled with colorful characters. Strongest of all are sections in which Rojas Contreras plays on the theme of amnesia to note that it pertains as much to willful maltreatment on the part of a country's oppressors--she writes of the "highly destructive and orchestrated oppression" of Black and Indigenous peoples--as to individuals saddled with a medical affliction, calamities endured through no fault of the victims. A moving depiction of family and the power of healing.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from July 1, 2022
After her celebrated debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree (2018), Rojas Contreras returns with a spellbinding memoir that brings her extended family's ancestral magic into the present day. At the center is her grandfather, Nono, a Colombian curandero. Rojas Contreras adroitly deepens her fascinating family stories by placing them within resonant historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts. An exemplary instance is a recollection of Nono's encounter with and quick escape from a water spirit disguised as a beautiful woman bathing nude in a lagoon. Rojas Contreras subsequently shares the water spirit's indigenous origin story from the Muisca people (which involves infidelity and bloody retribution) and likewise unpacks the Spanish colonial history of the region and even roots out the etymology of the word for water in Chibcha, a language native to Colombia. Rojas Contreras' uncompromising look at the past and her vivid, crystalline prose illuminate these many dimensions of her memoir, making it a compulsively readable book about one family's mystical experiences, one that has rightly earned recognition as one of the most anticipated titles of the summer.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2022
After her celebrated debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree (2018), Rojas Contreras returns with a spellbinding memoir that brings her extended family's ancestral magic into the present day. At the center is her grandfather, Nono, a Colombian curandero. Rojas Contreras adroitly deepens her fascinating family stories by placing them within resonant historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts. An exemplary instance is a recollection of Nono's encounter with and quick escape from a water spirit disguised as a beautiful woman bathing nude in a lagoon. Rojas Contreras subsequently shares the water spirit's indigenous origin story from the Muisca people (which involves infidelity and bloody retribution) and likewise unpacks the Spanish colonial history of the region and even roots out the etymology of the word for water in Chibcha, a language native to Colombia. Rojas Contreras' uncompromising look at the past and her vivid, crystalline prose illuminate these many dimensions of her memoir, making it a compulsively readable book about one family's mystical experiences, one that has rightly earned recognition as one of the most anticipated titles of the summer.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 1, 2022

Rojas Contreras (Fruit of the Drunken Tree) tells of three generations of her family. Nono, Rojas Contreras's grandfather, was a curandero, or traditional spiritual practitioner, in Colombia. In Rojas Contreras's culture, curandero secrets are passed only to men. However, both she and her mother, Mami, gain the secrets when they develop temporary amnesia in separate cases. Both coincide with misfortunes within the family, and Rojas Contreras uses her family's spiritual traditions to make sense of the aftermath. She explores the lives of Nono, Mami, and herself, focusing on their experiences with ghosts and premonitions, while reflecting on the differences between their traditional and knowledge learned in Western countries on spiritual matters. She also muses on the history of Colombia and analyzes the effects that the unrest may have had on her family. When she and several family members receive dreams from deceased Nono asking them to disinter his remains, they return to Colombia to do so. As they travel, Rojas Contreras reflects on the importance of stories to her family's well-being and their collective memory. VERDICT An eerie and introspective memoir.--Rebekah Kati

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.