Lo que no aprendí

Catalina is eleven in 1991, a year when Pablo Escobar, the extraditables and a constituent assembly convulse Colombia in ways she barely grasps. Her own family is no easier to read. The girls ahead of her in age act as if she counted for nothing, her mother erupts without warning, her small brother lives inside his head, and her father, a renowned lawyer people come to for counsel, slips into ecstatic trances. A discovery about his life, and about Aníbal, a young man she cannot forget, unsettles everything she believed. Then the household falls apart: the father retreats to the house where the family once lived, and she is left in the care of a grandmother intent on overfeeding her. In the book's second part, Catalina, now grown, thinks back on what fiction is and on her calling as a writer.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Coming of age, Family (assigned by AI)

Set in

Colombia, 1991

First published

2013 by Planeta

Author's age

33 when first published