Very mixed feelings on Night Prayers. Ultimately, it’s one of the best things I’ve read in 2025. It’s also one of the more frustrating.
Gamboa writes in the style of his Latin American contemporaries such as Bolaño and Marquez. And for the most part, he does it well. This is a style I always enjoy sampling, even if it can frustrate me at times with its tangents and magic realism. I quit the book several times in the beginning but was inexorably drawn back to it and am glad I stayed. It moved me, made me laugh, and kept me engaged throughout.
I’m giving very minor spoilers here but I think my big beef is with the way women are treated. I guess for such an erudite piece of literary fiction, I expected Gamboa to infuse his female characters with more nuance or to at least not reduce everything and anything to sex (save for the Mexican diplomat in Tokyo, I guess). And even when it wasn’t sex, women were being led by the motivations of men. Obviously, the patriarchy is alive and well in Colombia; it’d be foolish of me to hold Gamboa to a higher standard than the one I use for Stateside writers. But for the sister character, she was sanded down so much to nothing more than a marionette and done so in a way that wasn’t overly critical of her circumstances.
And again, I don’t mind that in other books but I think that’s why this one fell short of greatness for me. It is very good and I do want to peruse the rest of Gamboa’s catalog but I feel like a healthier, more compelling plot for the female characters would have elevated this to a new level.
