There is humor in the frequent revelation of self-delusions. There is also suspense as the storm–more interpersonal than weather-related–builds and breaks. Fabulist elements, lyrical prose, and a chorus of narrative voices give this slim novel depth and breadth.
– Kirkus Reviews Self-delusion, hallucinations, anger, volatility chafe against the soothing waters and the stars above, and González, one of South America's most acclaimed and pitch-perfect novelists, plunges you into the brutality of man and nature alike.
- Kerri Arsenault, Lit Hub In Andrea Rosenberg's translation, the author's stylistic traits–short and pointed phrases, poetic descriptions and poetic monologues–shine and linger in the reader's ear...
The Storm arrives as a welcome addition to the international recognition of one Colombia's most prolific and poetic writers.
- Nicolás Llano, Asymptote Journal A complex psychological portrait of a family on the verge of self-made disaster.
–Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books, in Shelf Awareness Praise for
In the Beginning was the Sea (Pushkin Press, 2014):
- Gonzalez poetically and comically captures the inevitable destruction of those who live in a world of fantasy and hubris, depicting beauty and despair by turns. –
Publishers Weekly -
In the Beginning Was the Sea [is] a book that simultaneously works as a political parable, a novel, and a mournful confessional... written in a fashion meant to hold up his own grief and disorientation as its own strange flower, an emotional germination meant both to stand on its own and be inseparable from all that surrounds it, an individual you, straining to emerge from a ceaseless body of discovery, loss, memory, and their insatiable repetition. –
Los Angeles Review of Books - The lyrical, haunting story has the feel of a fable–a young man and his beautiful wife abandon their hectic, intellectual, night-clubbing life in the city to buy a farm on an undeveloped stretch of coast–while the spare, disquieting prose suggests the start of an art-house horror film. - Daniel Levine,
Words Without Borders
