maximalist essay writing

The amount of content and craft moves pushed into each and every one of the essays in this collection makes approaching a book review feel nearly impossible, if I'm being honest. I want to feel like I'm covering all the bases of my thoughts, but my thoughts feel jumbled because each piece left me with a different impression of either awe or confusion. Over the entire collection, I was able to make clear connections back to the title and felt like I was therefore able to grasp themes of cultural identity, violence in Colombia, violence in America, and the author's multilayered relationships with multiple family members and their family history. I think my main point of contention is every essay's plethora of names. There's too many to keep track of, to be frank, which made the skim reading I was already doing even more difficult. But, to be fair, I understand how the author had to hold all of the names of these people and places to be able to write about her family and some of the more researched elements that intersect with her family history and history in Bogota, Colombia. I'm also aware I could've been a better reader and sat with each piece for longer, but I just didn't have the time. In connection to that, I think there's just one too many things going on in each essay. After learning that Cabeza-Vanegas' style of essay-writing is heavily inspired by Montaigne's rambling, digressing influence, I feel a lot more accepting of her maximalist style. Because that's clearly what's going on here: an attempt at approaching a variety of ideas, impressions, and images with a lot of language and repetition. Each essay is filled to the brim with similes and metaphors (my nonfiction class made jokes about counting how many we could find across the book, but that we didn't have that kind of time). Truthfully, this sense of maximized figurative language really only demonstrated to me that she's a talented, eloquent author. At times, I started to get annoyed at what seemed like a stretch of word choice or a rambling metaphor spanning across two or three sentences. There's a lot of digression going on on the sentence-level as well as the macro paragraph-level, which makes it really hard to focus on one thing at a time and reach the end of each essay with a sense of what its aboutness was. A few essays stand out to me particularly for very specific images and physical sensations, but aboutness-wise? They're mostly shaky. I know I'm the type of reader who appreciates a good flow of figurative language, but also the writer's ability to get me to the conclusion with a vague idea of what I should be feeling or taking away from the content. So, to wrap things up, this book and its emphasis on lofty prose and maximalism isn't ultimately for me, though I really appreciated the element of translation that can be found at the beginning of each essay. None of the translated idioms seemed to really connect to the content of the essay it was affiliated with, but I was kind of okay with that. Each part of the collection begins with a retold Colombian creation story as well, and these didn't clearly connect to other parts of the essays in a way I was also okay with. But I'm here for anything mythology related. :)



One of my favorite quotes from Don't Come Back:

"This is what we do, impose narratives on the unfurled darkness, try to steer heavens and countries for the greater good and the greater truth."

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