The third novel published by the Colombian writer Juan Sebastián Cárdenas will be published once again in 2023 by the label tusquets, after eight years of its original departure; At that time it appeared in Spanish bookstores published under the label peripheral.
“Ornament”which confirmed Cárdenas as one of the most interesting voices in Colombian literature in those years, after the publication of his two previous novels, “Buzz” Y “The Strata”, tells, over 160 pages, the story of four women who offer themselves in a pharmaceutical laboratory so that its director can test the effects of a new psychoactive drug. Her reactions will serve to analyze the possible behaviors of a person before the drug.
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During the process, one of them will have an intense connection with her mind, which will open like Pandora’s box and what comes out threatens to take the place of her reality.
“…now there is only a body or there is only a head, there are no entrances or exits of any body, the breasts are like two other heads that only know how to look inward, above the navel that seems to mumble something and now it is me, me as an extension of the face, like an ornament, like a solid firulete, a perplexed and not very graceful accessory that would have come out of the mouth of that expansive and centerless face” – (Fragment).
The novel is a kind of reinterpretation of Colombian society, victim of a drug that has multiplied like a virus: violence. Never before has a writer paid attention, so boldly and starkly, as he has. Juan Cardenas in this book, which is both suggestive and troubled.
In “Ornament”readers will go to the dislocated reflection of Colombian society and will feel that the author scolds them to look, more than once, to face that reality as corrosive as the drug itself.
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The space in which the plot takes place is a decadent and spectral city. The drug only works on women and is available to anyone, regardless of their condition. The one who narrates everything is the director of the laboratory himself, this mad scientist who has very little to do with madness, since he is shrewd and cold, and extremely calculating, except for what he leaves out with one of the patients, number four, who ends up marveling him with her beauty and eloquence.
What number four says and does when she is under the influence of the drug, while the scientist studies her carefully, ends up making him fall in love. Like her, in the midst of her ecstasy, he passes through the spells of her charms.
The scientist has a wife, a renowned plastic artist who is facing an intense creative crisis, but he does not pay attention to it and gives himself completely to his patient. The three of them will maintain a complicated love triangle and thanks to the drug they will make everything more harmonious, but over time, things will fade away. With his words, number four makes the artist, the scientist’s wife, see herself before the mirror that she has evaded for so long.
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Inside the pages of “Ornament”which its author wrote inspired by a work by the architect Adolf Loos, art, science and philosophy come together, as well as reflections on the existing gaps between social classes, with the elites increasingly removed from reality.
Also published in Argentina by the Sigilo label, this is one of the riskiest novels by Juan Cárdenas, among the seven that he has released. The Colombian is also the author of “The devil of the provinces (2017), “Shadow Elastic” (2019) and, the most recent, “Transparent pilgrim” (2023).
In 2017, the Colombian, who is also a translator, was included in the list of Bogota 39 of the Hay Festival, which highlights the best Latin American storytellers under 39 years of age. Currently, he works as a professor in the Creative Writing master’s program at the Instituto Caro y Cuervo, in Bogotá.
Most of his work is being republished in Colombia by the subsidiary of Grupo Planeta, through its Tusquets label. From the editor’s hand John David Correahave already been published “Return to eat from the tree of knowledge”, “Buzz”, “The Strata”Y “The devil of the provinces”.
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