Colombia (Lonely Planet, 5th Edition) - Jens Porup [22]
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Salsa spread throughout the Caribbean and hit Colombia in the late 1960s. Cali and Barranquilla have since become Colombia’s bastions of salsa music, but it’s heard all across the country and is the most popular club music in Bogotá. Today, Colombia has innumerable salsa bands and plenty of excellent salseros (salsa singers). Considered among the best are Joe Arroyo from the Caribbean coast and Grupo Niche from Cali.
Joropo, the music of Los Llanos, is usually accompanied by a harp, cuatro (a type of four-string guitar) and maracas. It has much in common with the music of the Venezuelan Llanos.
Colombia has also generated many unique rhythms from the fusion of Afro-Caribbean and Spanish influences, including porro, currulao, merecumbe, mapalé and gaita.
Colombian Andean music is strongly influenced by Spanish rhythms and instruments, and differs noticeably from the indigenous music of the Peruvian and Bolivian highlands. Among typical old genres are the bambuco, pasillo and torbellino, instrumental styles featuring predominantly string instruments.
In the cities, especially Bogotá and Medellín, many discos play techno and house; big-name international DJs sometimes play both cities.
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Efraim Medina Reyes is making a name for himself as the author of quirky titles Masturbation Techniques between Batman and Robin (2003) and Sexuality of the Pink Panther (2004).
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Literature
Think of Colombian literature and Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez springs to mind. Colombia has a long (if modest) literary tradition, however, which began to form shortly after independence from Spain in 1819 and gravitated into the sphere of European romanticism. Rafael Pombo (1833–1912) is generally acclaimed as the father of Colombian romantic poetry and Jorge Isaacs (1837–95), another notable author of the period, is particularly remembered for his romantic novel María, which can still be spotted in cafes and classrooms around the country.
José Asunción Silva (1865–96), one of Colombia’s most remarkable poets, is considered the precursor of modernism in Latin America. He planted the seeds that were later developed by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Another literary talent, Porfirio Barba Jacob (1883–1942), known as ‘the poet of death,’ introduced the ideas of irrationalism and the language of the avant-garde.
Talented contemporaries of García Márquez include poet, novelist and painter Héctor Rojas Herazo, and Álvaro Mutis, a close friend. Of the younger generation, seek out the works of Fernando Vallejo, a highly respected iconoclast who has claimed that García Márquez lacks originality and is a poor writer; popular young expat Santiago Gamboa; and Mario Mendoza and Laura Restrepo, prolific writers who have each cranked out five major works in recent years.
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GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ – COLOMBIA’S NOBEL LAUREATE
Gabriel García Márquez, or ‘Gabo’ as he is affectionately known, is the key figure of Colombian literature. Born March 6, 1928 in the town of Aracataca in the department of Magdalena, he has written primarily about Colombia, but lived most of his adult life in Mexico and Europe.
García Márquez began writing as a journalist in the 1950s and worked as a foreign correspondent, from where he criticized the Colombian government and basically forced himself into exile. He gained fame through his novels, particularly One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967. It mixed myths, dreams and reality, and tantalized readers with a new form of expression dubbed realismo mágico (magic realism) – now so popular that it is invariably the first genre that you will learn about in any introduction to Latin American literature course.
In 1982 García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since then, he has created a wealth of fascinating work that extends well beyond magic realism. Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) is a story based loosely on the courtship of his parents. The General in his Labyrinth (1989)