PRETEND YOU'RE DEAD AND I CARRY YOU

A fierce Colombian coming-of-age story shaped by grief and secrecy.

A daughter grows up in the shadow of her father’s unraveling, piecing together a family history shaped by violence, repressed desire, and Colombia’s Magdalena River in this haunting, nonlinear novel. Moving between the rural past and contemporary Bogotá, Delgado Lopera traces Valentina’s coming-of-age alongside the story of her father, Ignacio, whose life has been marked by repression and withdrawal. After the death of Valentina’s mother, found in a river that feeds into the Magdalena, the two live in a cramped apartment thick with neglect. Ignacio drifts through his days in a state of exhaustion while Valentina clings to TV fantasies, friendships, and whatever fragments of memory help her make sense of what has been lost. The novel gains force as it turns backward toward Ignacio’s youth, where masculinity is enforced through brutality and tenderness is treated as weakness to be beaten out. Delgado Lopera handles these early scenes with an unflinching eye, particularly a brutal lesson in what it means to be a man in Ignacio’s world, which involves the slaughter of his beloved pig. Later, in underground queer spaces, Ignacio glimpses another life, one defined by transformation and possibility, but which he is too afraid to inhabit. That reluctance shapes the life of his daughter in ways at once intimate and devastating. Throughout, the Magdalena is more than backdrop. It is a national artery that doubles as a graveyard, a place where Colombia’s history of violence has quite literally accumulated. As the story weaves between memory and myth, the river gathers these lives into its current, linking personal loss to a broader collective reckoning.

A stark portrait of the damage passed from parent to child.