In 2010, Alejandro López disappeared in Colombia, his native country, where he returned to settle after 25 years in Canada. A desapariciwheren forzada (“enforced disappearance”), as the Colombians call it. Which is to say he’s probably dead, and violently. Inhabited by this mourning that she cannot manage, her daughter Ana seeks to understand what led to the death of her father in a quest inseparable from that of her origins.
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First novel by Montreal journalist and author Mali Navia, The banality of a shot is an autofiction inspired by a family story that is certainly not trivial. Bohemian parents, mixed origins (a Canadian mother and a Colombian father), the loneliness of a child who grew up between two worlds and the pains of exile weave the fabric of this powerful story. “I got stuck between the North and the South in a kind of nothingness that makes everyone look at me with a question mark in the face. I have a name from elsewhere, eyes from elsewhere, a skin from here, an accent from here. My strangeness is only explained when I walk hand in hand with my dad. We immediately say to ourselves “he is not from here” without ever asking him where he is from. »
If, as a child, she often felt shame in the face of this different father, today she bears the guilt and it is by unraveling the thread of her origins, from Montreal to Pereira, in Colombia, via Huntingdon that ‘Ana López attempts to heal a wound lurking at the heart of her identity.
For this first novel, Mali Navia offers us a sensitive story that has breath, where strength rubs shoulders with vulnerability and difficulties, the poetry of everyday life. Gorgeous.
The banality of a shot
Mali Navia
Lemeac
200 pages