The Keketa Papers

Martín receives the call about his mother's death while he is in the middle of a lecture in Seattle. He flies to Bogotá, arranges the funeral, and spends three weeks in his parents' house. On the last day, his father hands him a cardboard box. Inside are the documents of his grandmother Enriqueta — Keketa — whose papers no one had read in decades. A diary written at sea in 1896. A letter from the general Rafael Uribe Uribe on the eve of the War of a Thousand Days. Two speeches delivered, one to the World Union of Catholic Women and one to the United Nations. Memoirs written beside the fire during the state of siege of 1948, then abandoned for nineteen years without explanation. Martín is a social anthropologist. He knows how to read an archive. The Keketa Papers follows him through Bogotá as he prepares to sell the plot at Monteluce, the last of the family's old estate and through the documents themselves as they reconstruct a Colombian family's twentieth century: the Williamsons from Antioquia, the colonel who fought on the losing side of every war, the treasure hunter who found a pre-Columbian aqueduct and never finished excavating it. What Martín discovers in the box is not only his family's history but a person — his grandmother, a woman who thought seriously about the world she was given to live in, wrote down what she thought, and went to say it where she believed it needed to be said. A woman who was, it turns out, more than anyone in the family knew. Ideal for readers of Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Héctor Abad Faciolince, and Álvaro Mutis.