The Angel of Galilea

by Laura Restrepo

Vintage, 208 pp., $12 (paper)

In a country where the worst slums are named after Biblical cities, priests enlist teenage thugs to intimdate parishoners, and the newspaper’s top priority is the national beauty pagent, an angel arrives in the barrio. Beleagured Bogotá reporter Mona is sent to get the story and comes back obsessed with a beautiful young angel boy who speaks no Spanish, rarely interacts with people, has epileptic seizures, and yet is adored by the desperate and dejected. The problem of the divine soul fettered by human weakness has so much potential, but unfortunately specious translation and clumsy collisions between Mona’s mundane middle-class life and her glorious angel dreams break the spell of this book, leaving us mired in the material world, blind to the possibilities of heaven.

This article appears in December 3 • 1999.

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