Description

"A Letter to Magic and Madness" is an intimate odyssey between two brothers, where the landscapes of Latin America become mirrors of an impossible grief.

When the narrator flees Santiago for Colombia, he carries only a light suitcase and a yellow notebook meant for letters that Mark—his older brother, his lost idol—will never read. What begins as an escape soon becomes a dialogue with ghosts: in the sacred lagoons of Guatavita, where the Muisca once offered gold to water gods; in Bogotá hostels where drunk backpackers argue about love; in volcanoes that guard secrets older than sorrow.

Amid legends of priests covered in gold and conquistadors who died trying to steal it, the narrator weaves a raw meditation on brotherhood, madness, and the ironies of history. Mark—a skeptical scientist who still believed in the soul—haunts every page: in memories of childhood fights in Devon, in debates about cosmic coincidences, in his ghostly laughter recalling the time he was found unconscious after inhaling nitrous oxide.

How do you travel with someone who's no longer there? Can a sacred lake answer questions science cannot reach? With prose that shifts between the visceral ("smog is a blanket smothering the children of mothers too poor to weep") and the lyrical ("rain spits like half-hearted regrets"), this book is an elegy to brotherly complicity and an open question about the limits of love.

For readers of Roberto Bolaño (for its narrative rawness) and Héctor Abad Faciolince (for its treatment of filial grief).