3.5
The Sky Over Lima
ByPublisher Description
“Refreshing, comic, and sublime...The conquest in this novel, a game played by one writer and his readers, captivates, drawing us in through the seductive power of a monumental young author.”
—Laura Esquivel, bestselling author of Like Water for Chocolate and Malinche
“Intoxicating…I’ll be thinking of these characters, what they longed to create and what they managed to despoil, for a long time.” —Helen Oyeyemi
A retelling of a fantastical true story: two young men seduce Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez with the words of an imaginary woman and inspire one of his greatest love poems.
José Gálvez and Carlos Rodríguez are poets. Or, at least, they’d like to be. Sons of Lima’s elite in the early twentieth century, they scribble bad verses and read the greats: Rilke, Rimbaud, and, above all others, Juan Ramón Jímenez, the Spanish Maestro. Desperate for Jímenez’s latest work, unavailable in Lima, they decide to ask him for a copy. They’re sure Jímenez won’t send two dilettantes his book, but he might favor a beautiful woman. They write to him as the lovely, imaginary Georgina Hübner. Jímenez responds with a letter and a book. Elated, José and Carlos write back. Their correspondence continues, as the Maestro falls in love with Georgina, and the boys abandon poetry for the pages of Jímenez’s life.
—Laura Esquivel, bestselling author of Like Water for Chocolate and Malinche
“Intoxicating…I’ll be thinking of these characters, what they longed to create and what they managed to despoil, for a long time.” —Helen Oyeyemi
A retelling of a fantastical true story: two young men seduce Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez with the words of an imaginary woman and inspire one of his greatest love poems.
José Gálvez and Carlos Rodríguez are poets. Or, at least, they’d like to be. Sons of Lima’s elite in the early twentieth century, they scribble bad verses and read the greats: Rilke, Rimbaud, and, above all others, Juan Ramón Jímenez, the Spanish Maestro. Desperate for Jímenez’s latest work, unavailable in Lima, they decide to ask him for a copy. They’re sure Jímenez won’t send two dilettantes his book, but he might favor a beautiful woman. They write to him as the lovely, imaginary Georgina Hübner. Jímenez responds with a letter and a book. Elated, José and Carlos write back. Their correspondence continues, as the Maestro falls in love with Georgina, and the boys abandon poetry for the pages of Jímenez’s life.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Sky Over Lima Reviews
3.5
“Catfish but make it classy. "The Sky Over Lima" is one of the most unsatisfying, un-triumphant, and refreshing love stories I've read. Less "the one who got away" and more "the one who wasn't there," Bárcena suggests that love, like writing, is mostly fabrication (my jaded and cynical heart rejoices): "just as Goethe gave suicide to the Germans...we don’t write novels; novels write us.”
The tragic novel that ended with letters that started with romance that started with comedy aptly concludes with poetry: "And if our arms are destined never to intertwine,/ then what heedless child, born of hatred and pain,/ made the world, unwitting, while blowing soap bubbles?". It's love in all its literary iterations. It's postmodernism at its satirical best. It's falling in love with falling in love with falling in love, removed several times from the original muse. And it's all ridiculously well done.
"But love– where is it? It’s not there yet because nobody has given it words. Love is a discourse, my friend, it’s a serial novel, a narrative, and if it’s not written in your head or on paper or wherever, it doesn’t exist, it remains only half done."
"TSOL" has the unique quality of being written as you're reading, as if skipping ahead several pages you'll find nothing but blankness. The characters, José and Carlos, literally contemplate deus ex machina and the morality of "inventing" characters. The narrator blames a rat for not eating the letters because "what began as a comedy- two poets playing both at being poor and at being a woman- will end as a tragedy: a man attempting to make love to a ghost." For a bleeding-heart romantic, it's goddamn amazing.
4.5 stars because anachronisms and fourth-wall breaks are my literary pet peeves. Postmodernist writing is already on steroids, no need to decorate the tree so much you can't even see its leaves.”
About Juan Gómez Bárcena
JUAN GÓMEZ BÁRCENA holds degrees in literary theory, comparative literature, and history from the Complutense University of Madrid, and a degree in philosophy from Spain’s National University of Distance Education. He’s the author of numerous essay, short story, and poetry collections, for which he’s received the José Hierro Prize for Poetry and Fiction, the International CRAPE Prize for stories, and the Ramón J. Sender Prize for Narrative, among others. He lives in Madrid.
Other books by Juan Gómez Bárcena
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