Shooting Down Heaven

February 24, 2020
At the heart of Franco’s uneven latest (after Paradise Travel) is the family of Libardo, a Colombian cartel capo and former associate of Pablo Escobar. The book begins 12 years after Libardo’s disappearance and is primarily narrated by his son, Larry, who has been living in London and has returned to Medellín to give his father a proper burial after his remains were discovered in a mass grave. The book proceeds to tell just how Libardo ended up there and the impact of his disappearance on the family. Franco banks on the long game, scripting his story like a serial telenovela, with digressive subplots including a quasi-romance between Larry and an airline passenger and a heavy dependency on cliffhangers. While it takes a while for these threads to coalesce, patient readers will be rewarded with some rich character development, particularly in Larry’s mother, Fernanda, a former beauty queen and embittered matriarch. While the focus on Fernanda enlivens the book in the latter half, helped no doubt by Rosenberg’s spunky translation, the appearance of vampires, an absurd death by psychedelic-induced mishap, and an eye-rolling Sleepless in Seattle–like ending don’t help. Franco’s entry into the growing pantheon of cartel dramas might look better on TV.

Starred review from February 15, 2020
A prodigal son returns to a spectral Colombia in a novel by a writer praised by Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez. "My father's [death] obeys a natural law in Colombia--the law of the jungle." So says Larry, returning to Medell�n after a dozen years away, his father having been kidnapped and killed in the endless cartel wars. His father, Libardo, was a man accustomed to luxury, for, as Franco's (Paradise Travel, 2006, etc.) novel unfolds, with the time and point of view constantly shifting, we learn of his powerful place within the crime syndicate ruled by Pablo Escobar. His boss gunned down, anguish eats at Libardo as he realizes that he's now a target himself. He disappears, leaving his wife, "the former Miss Medell�n 1973," to drink, shop, and slowly disintegrate. In a scenario reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero, Larry and his friends drink, smoke pot, snort coke, and look for something to do, trading barbs that the translator renders in perfect young Americanese, "dudes" and "bullshit" and all. Those friends bear names like La Murci�laga (Batwoman, that is), Carlos Chiquito (Teeny Tiny Charles), and Pedro the Dictator. Collectively they slide, free fall, into addiction and the betrayals large and small that, Franco suggests, are inevitable in a society consumed by violence: "I'd often pass by the site of a recent explosion and shudder at the wreckage, the dried blood," Larry recalls of Escobar's car-bomb campaign. "Anything might be a piece of leg, an arm; a pile of something would look like a pile of guts, and there was always a lone shoe somewhere, loose sneakers, flip-flops, boots amid the rubble." A dark moment comes when it slowly dawns on Larry that his mother and his best friend are up to no good, and vengeance follows with a flicker of magical realism courtesy of an appearance by Libardo's ghost. For the most part the story is grimly realistic, however, even as it ends with a welcome suggestion of redemption A cheerless but supremely well-crafted story that proves Franco to be among the best Latin American writers at work today.

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