Antes de los años terribles by Víctor Del Árbol

Abstract

Reviewed by: Antes de los años terribles by Víctor Del Árbol Joanne Lucena Del Árbol, Víctor. Antes de los años terribles. Planeta, 2019. Pp. 461. ISBN 978-8-42335-571-6. Víctor del Árbol, well known for his prior international best sellers, Un millón de gotas (2015 winner of the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière), La víspera de casi todo (2016 Premio Nadal winner), and Por encima de la lluvia (2017), continues his success with his latest novel, Antes de los años terribles (2019). In an interview on YouTube (2019) by El Buho entre libros, Del Árbol declares that it is not his choice to decide whether this novel is his best work to date or not, rather, it is up to the reader. Nevertheless, Del Árbol ends the interview by asserting that this is the first time in his life that he can honestly say that nothing will ever be the same, neither in his personal life nor as a writer, after having written Antes de los años terribles. This sentiment is shared by many readers who continue to ponder the novel and its connection to current politics long after they have finished it. The novel is quite brilliant for it is a retelling of Joseph’s Conrad’s Heart of Darkness set in present day Uganda with a historical background of the child soldiers [End Page 303] of the The Lord’s Resistance Army and their charismatic yet terrifying leader, Joseph Kony. Even if one has not read Heart of Darkness, Del Árbol makes obvious references to its importance. Isaías Yoweri, the novel’s principal protagonist, carries a copy of the text as one of his prized possessions, a gift from a white mercenary who trains the child soldiers, Christian Mother Fucker (later in the novel to be referred to as MF by Isaias). In two different sections of the novel, the author references Joseph Conrad’s text to describe not only the relationship between Marlow and Kurtz, but to underline the characters’ parallel reactions that represent the fatal attraction to a dark and powerful evil, in the novel’s case, Joseph Kony. The novel skillfully alternates between 2016 in Spain, where Isaías narrates his present in Barcelona with his Spanish wife, Lucía, and his return to Uganda to confront his past, and 1992–1994 when the “terrible years” occur in Africa. The novel opens with a preface dated from the summer of 2017 where Isaís is interviewed by a fellow African, Cecile, in whom he had confided a year before. His friends and neighbors know nothing of the Isaías that Cecile is interviewing, nor of his tragic history. However, the narration of the novel concretely begins in January of 2016 where Isaías decides that that would be a good place to start because he receives a visit in Spain from a former child soldier cohort of his who implores him to return to Uganda in the name of restorative justice and to testify and bear witness against war crimes. In Spain he has crafted a completely new identity as the “black man of the bicycles” where he repairs old bicycles and completely represses his past. Chapter two opens in 1992 when Isaías is twelve and his younger brother Joel, merely eight, and they are both conscripted into the Lord’s Resistance Army after their parents are murdered by the followers of Joseph Kony. Del Árbol, in the aforementioned interview, admits to first hearing of Kony and his army when he read an article from Time Magazine (2012), that highlighted the horror of the child soldiers and what they were forced to undergo during their indoctrination and massacres of villagers in Africa. The author attests that he spent about eight years researching this theme which included listening to countless interviews with former soldiers and their wives. Although he knew about the history he didn’t feel that he had the appropriate maturity level to write a novel that would cover the magnitude of what he had discovered and wanted to portray. Nevertheless, Del Árbol highlights his commitment to and interest...