January 19, 2004
The American debut by award-winning Colombian novelist Franco is an energetic but awkward combination of As I Lay Dying
and a Quentin Tarantino splatter-fest—a slim novel that leans more toward the latter's B-movie violence than Faulkner's penetrating examination of a character's death. Beginning when Rosario Tijeras is shot at point-blank range, the narrator, one Antonio, tells the story of the Colombian beauty who got her name (Tijeras means scissors) from the weapon she once used to castrate a man who attacked her. As Rosario lies dying in a Medellín hospital, Antonio recounts her troubled life in flashbacks and memories, revealing a stricken empathy (he feels "Rosario's anguished solitude in this world"). Unfortunately, his infatuation with Rosario, "one of those women who are poison and antidote at the same time," feels like a mixture of adolescent infatuation and routine sexual tension. Meanwhile, Rosario's story is full of South American hit men and drug runners; she's a neighborhood idol—"Castrate me with your kisses," reads graffiti scrawled in her honor—but she never feels completely real. Franco's prose is uneven: it's impassioned and colorful, but marred by overly dramatic lines like "Rosario looked most deadly and most woman when she was making love." The novel won the Dashiell Hammett prize in 2000, but what's hard-boiled about the novel—the action, the murder, the femme fatale—fits uneasily with the melodrama of unrequited love and a woman whose kisses taste "like a dead person's." Franco shows talent, but readers may hope that his next gritty urban drama has a bit more plot backing it up.