Sidewalks

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Sometimes unexpected things happen that fit together so perfectly it seems as though the ultimate computer that controls and watches over everything does exist after all. A couple of years ago, when I was in Bogotá, I received an e-mail from Karaat, a Dutch publishing house I did not know, asking me to write a foreword for a book by a young Mexican writer I had never heard of. I asked my Colombian host, the poet Pedro Alejo Gómez, who was once the Colombian ambassador to the Netherlands and now runs the Poetry House in Bogotá, if he knew her, but no, he had never heard of her either. Now, it is not the case that books by authors and poets from one Latin American country are sold or discussed in all the other countries on that continent — far from it. Which is why it came as a double surprise when that same day, in a large bookstore in Bogotá, I spotted her book: a slim, crimson edition without any adornment, just the laconic title, Papeles falsos, and her name, Valeria Luiselli.

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