Book by Andrés Hoyos that recreates the country in stormy times. From the Seix Barral Brief Library collection.
Alberto Rivera
Guillermo Linero, the tycoon, has died. With his departure, the problems will begin for a family and a business group that have been left adrift due to disagreements that have never been resolved. He is survived by, on the one hand, Lola, his beautiful and glamorous wife; Gustavo, the ruthless brother of his businessman, and Memo, Guillermo’s only son, a homosexual, little loved by his father.
Although the commonplace has been used hundreds of times, this novel confirms that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. After Guillermo’s death, two sides will fight with more or less legal tricks for control of the Linero Group, made up of numerous companies and properties in various countries.
This novel by writer Andrés Hoyos portrays the country during a particularly stormy moment in Colombian history, in the early 1990s. A family gathers in clubs, hotels, and restaurants to plan ways to lie, cheat, and betray each other while they fight for a large inheritance.
Who is Aunt Lola?
Before the beginning of the book, Lola Velasco was a lady of Bogotá’s high society—dinners, visits to the spa, teas, trips to New York and Paris—whose story did not deserve to be told in a novel. However, during the first chapter, her husband, Guillermo Linero, a great tycoon from Valle de Cauca but based years ago in Bogotá, dies after suffering a polo accident, which causes a great empire to fall on Lola’s shoulders. , a woman clearly not prepared for it. Thus, the more than 600 pages of the novel tell us who Lola becomes during the first two years of her widowhood. After suffering attacks from various sides and having problems, she shows a strength that few expected. Not even I, who am the author, that is, the remote father. Likewise, Lola has a couple of reunions with her love past, which is very important to her.
Guillermo Linero, the tycoon, has died. How is the fight of its survivors for the inheritance?
Like other contemporary magnates of his, Guillermo Linero had unorthodox or conventional methods. He skipped a lot of bullfighter things, often even the law. It must be taken into account that although he did almost nothing ugly, he did not get into drug trafficking, which in 1990 was experiencing its most traumatic peak under the bloodthirsty leadership of Pablo Escobar. Guillermo had become the authoritarian boss of his brothers and had bought his sisters’ shares in the family businesses, achieving a majority shareholding in everything. With him gone, Gustavo Adolfo, his younger brother, believes his time has come and does everything in his power to displace Lola, who of course inherits almost everything from her husband, with the exception of the small piece that corresponds to her son ( children?). As the pages turn we see that she, with style and cordiality, does not allow herself to be pushed out and surrounds herself well with her.
It is an unhappy family, of course, but will any of them or someone else stay with the Linero Group?
I don’t think it’s pertinent to tell in an interview how the fight outlined above ends, except to say that Lola turned out to be a lady with quite a few spurs. Now, and as everything must be said, none of the characters aspires to leave anyone on the street, only to have the power to manage the Linero Group. A very important fact, which I am not going to talk about here either, is resolved very close to the end of the book.
How to face such a process in the country of the 90s, so confused by violence?
For a novelist, confused and chaotic times are the best, for conflicts abound, which are the central raw material of any weighty narrative. In other words, a great novel developed in Switzerland is difficult to make vibrant. That being said, the characters are all made up, but the times are not. I remind kind readers that 1989 was perhaps the worst year of the second half of the 20th century in Colombia, and for that very reason it was optimal for a novel. List of little problems at that time: the collapse of political parties through assassinations, the terrorism of the Extraditables, the Constituent Assembly, revolutionary violence and I can’t stop counting.
Does the family come together to plan how to lie, cheat, and betray each other?
Yes and no or the opposite. A large economic group, such as Linero, needs results and to achieve them it is clear that their bosses resort to lies, but not just lies. There is also altruism, camaraderie and multiple affections. Tía Lola is not just a narrative of deceit, but it contains a good part of the panoply of human emotions and attitudes, good and bad.
He directs El Malpensante again. How do you get to the magazine again?
Well… it’s just that I’m the most viable director left available. I have experience, I presume to have criteria and I earn little. Actually, they are not paying me salary. Hopefully the day will come when I can let go of the helm again. We’ll see.
He has books and film and television scripts in the writing process. When to make them known?
Well, maybe some reader of El Diario de Pereira is interested. You can contact me at my email: [email protected]. I hear offers.
How do you maintain your newspaper articles in other media, for 30 years of your life?
In addition to the fact that sometimes I write about the arts, which are my natural territory, I live pending national and international reality. I read almost everything that falls into my hands. Of course, I choose the topic of each column as suggested in my book, Writing Manual, after finding some seed. What is a seed in this case? A doubt, something unresolved, a surprising angle. Does that seed always grow? I would like to, but no. Also, I’m not an extremist and that sometimes exasperates some readers.
Who is Andres Hoyos?
I am a veteran writer from Bogotá. My family is from old Caldas, but we became Bogota, for better or for worse? They accuse me of being bourgeois, which I cannot deny, at least as far as origin is concerned. I have published several books. I don’t like autobiographical literature, since my life has few novel elements like those of Guillermo Linero or Lola Velasco. I was once an introverted child, which caused me to develop a predilection for made-up stories. I will continue more or less in the same for the time that I have left, as long as the head remains operational and in its place.
The writer
Andrés Hoyos was born in Bogotá in 1953. He studied high school in the city of Baltimore, United States. After an incomplete academic career, he lived in Paris between 1975 and 1976 and returned to Colombia at the end of that last year. He briefly passed through opposition journalism and in 1979 entered the world of business and literature simultaneously.
He has published eleven books: Along the path of the fallen angels (1989, novel), It is convenient for the happy to stay at home (1992, novel), The widowers (and other stories) (1994, stories), The Pharaoh’s tomb (2000 , novel), Vera (2002, novel), an anthology of poems by Silvia Plath (1993), another bilingual anthology of Paul Verlaine’s poetry (1995), a version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2000), Cordial drops, a book of aphorisms and short texts (Malpensante Books, 2003) and Writing Manual (Malpensante Books, 2015). Her latest novel, Los hijos de la fiesta, came out in April 2016 in Libros Malpensante and it was her eleventh book.