I'm really enjoying this book at the moment - My Colombian Death. Maybe "enjoy" is not really the right word. I feel very unsettled each time I read it but keep going back to it. It has made me think how grateful I am for my home,my freedom, my country - its peace - things which most of us take for granted.
Kidnappings, car bombs, cocaine, paramilitaries, bullfights, the Amazon and madness. Welcome to Colombia, where life is cheap and so are the drugs.
In 2006, Matt Thompson travelled to Colombia in search of the life he might have led. Born to American parents, Matt's father was offered a post which would have taken the family to Bogota, but he turned it down because it was too high risk. Instead they came to Australia – low-risk, even paradisaic – and the land that nearly drove Matt to a slow death from boredom.
One day he quits his job, picks up his bag and decides to go experience life in the country that's not only the most dangerous in South America, but possibly the world. This is the story of what happened next.
The 35-year-old writer deliberately sought out dangerous scenarios as a strange form of personal quest. He'd worked unhappily as a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald, describing himself as a "hair-pulling, stressed-out lunatic with a bad back". Bored by his daily routine, Thompson craved action so urgently that he left for Colombia just one month after the birth of his first child. "I felt like I could live my whole life without ever knowing whether I could trust my instincts," he explains.
"In Australia you get carried along by a decent economy, decent social services, law and order - it's such a stable country. I wanted to spend time somewhere where the consequences of a mistake were extremely serious. I wanted to see whether I could handle the intensity and to see whether I was up for it."
Other books to along the same line Marching Powder, In Memory of Pablo Escobar and watching Blow well of course Senor Depp and Pene Cruz - cmon! and more recently Maria Full of Grace.
No comments:
Post a Comment