This was a very good book. Thanks to Archiplago for approving and sending in the ARC. I read the book later in paperback.

fabulous -- another outstanding title from Pushkin Press - would recommend this title to other readers

The Farm is a sprawling family saga set against Columbia’s recent turbulent history and explores issues of memory, nostalgia, and the concept of home. It opens with the death of family matriarch Ana. Her three children must decide on the future of the farm, a place which has been central to their sense of family and belonging all their lives, but which, without their parents, has lost much of its meaning. Pilar, the oldest of the three, a traditional and religious woman, lives there with her childhood sweetheart and is deeply attached to the property. Eva’s feelings have been affected by an attack by left-wing guerrillas, Los Musicos, who raided the farm when she was there alone. Antonio lives in New York with his partner Jon, an artist, and feels disconnected from the farm, only visiting once or twice a year. Without their mother arranging family get-togethers, he too feels that La Oculta is irrelevant to his life and knows that Jon doesn’t even want to visit. So now they must decide what to do – to stay or to sell up and leave. The siblings contemplate their attachment – or lack of it – to La Oculta in successive first-person chapters, and we thus get the point of view and inner thoughts of each of them. I found it an interesting read, and enjoyed learning about Columbia’s recent history, but the book felt overly long to me with some rather tedious passages, especially in Antonio’s chapters when he delves into the history not only of the farm and his family but of settlement in the area in general. I feel that a tighter structure would have helped the story move along in a more engaging way, without detriment to the issues explored. Nevertheless overall it’s an absorbing novel and well worth reading.

“It wasn’t out of laziness or prudence or chastity that I began to be anchored to Jon. A person gets used to a body the way one gets used to a farm or a landscape: there is something comforting about always seeing the same thing every day: there is charm in routine, the way you appreciate a violin piece more that you’ve played and heard many times. As La Oculta will always be my home, the only place I feel is my own, joined to me like a limb, Jon is my other half, or I am his rib, in the rewritten bible of our times, the husband I want to have for the rest of my life. I don’t know the reason, but it’s as if my body and my head had decided without even thinking about it. That’s simply the way it is.”
The ties of the land – and the lives of three siblings whose experiences are intertwined with the land – is the subject of this novel. The three are the inheritors of La Oculta, a farm in the mountains of Columbia. Pilar, the oldest, married and settled in her domesticity; Eva haunted by her experiences years ago at the hands of the guerillas, and still searching for a metaphorical home, and Antonio Ángel, who lives with his partner in the US. Each are tied to the land and farm that has been in their family for generations, and the story follows each in consecutive chapters. It’s as much their story as a story of their ancestors and a look at the violence that has plagued and tormented Columbians. An interesting – but somewhat slow read however.

Three adults inherit their childhood home, a farmstead in remote Colombia. One is a much-married woman who can't settle, one is the daughter that seems to have the brains – at least she has stayed with her childhood love, and the man is now a gay New Yorker. They also inherit the job of giving their own first person stories about the farm and their family, and they're wildly divergent. In fact you may well wonder if they're not too diverse. Clearly what we're looking at is a huge state-of-the-nation novel, sweeping right back from when socialist-minded pioneers founded the settlement that houses the farm, through all the recent chequered histories of Colombia to a diaspora that takes her people across the world. Unfortunately what we get is very uneven – the brighter early bits, the tale of the woman under threat from armed thugs who would steal the farm from under the inhabitants – really don't fit in with the meandering (and frankly quite boring at times) pieces from the man, whose sections prove that you should at least try for character through action, by being all exposition and nothing as regards activity. In the end the book, however much we appreciate the fact that rural Latin America gets the deserved state-of-the-nation door-stopper just as much as the USA gets one every flipping year, we have to admit this is too woolly, far too long, and doesn't quite connect with audiences outside its source population. It has some very strong writing, but it is too laborious and full of too many mood-swings to be completely enjoyable.

Not quite what I was expecting, but a beautiful read all the same.