Simpatía

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When Ulises Kan’s wife leaves Caracas and moves abroad without him, her father befriends him, and when the father-in-law dies, Ulises finds he has been bequeathed the bizarre task of turning the family mansion into a shelter for dogs. The untranslatable word, simpatía, an intermingling of sympathy and charm, captures the kinship of stragglers and strays in the cleared-out Venezuelan capital. So too does it describe the Latin American electorate’s enshrining of a long line of larger-than-life political figures, from Simón Bolívar to Hugo Chávez. Where with The Night, awarded the prestigious Mario Vargas Llosa Biennial Prize in 2019, Blanco Calderón established himself preeminently as a writer of labyrinthine darkness. Simpatía, his second novel, unreels in prose that is both more refined and more exuberant. A novel of men and dogs, Simpatía unearths the secrets of Blanco Calderón’s native Caracas and finds humor and humanity in our monstrous, postlapsarian present