Pablo Montoya and the celebration of the eccentric

Abstract

The Colombian writer Pablo Montoya is also a translator and a musician (he abandoned symphonic orchestras when he opted definitely for the first “profession”). His biographical information helps us to justify the scope of this essay, which aims at analyzing the narratives in which Montoya displays his wide variety of knowledge. As well as different writers in South America, he besieges our “cornerstones” (for example, the 19th century), and a huge archive (Occident itself), but in a rather unusual way: his choice of subjects and methodologies reveals that he is based on a delicate and disruptive esthetics that establishes connections with unexpected traditions and repertoires. On the other hand, Montoya gets in touch obliquely with recurring themes in Latin American literature, such as violence, uprooting, transience, etc., together with eccentric modes of imagination that imply a Latin identity that has been hardly considered in Latin America. His novels La sed del ojo (2004), Lejos de Roma (2008), and Tríptico de la infamia (2014) are concrete examples in this sense.