In Gloria, Andres Felipe Solano crafts a delicate tapestry that weaves between decades and continents, creating a novel that is both intimate in its character study and expansive in its themes of belonging, displacement, and the ineffable passage of time. Published in English translation by Will Vanderhyden, this work introduces English-language readers to Solano’s distinctive voice—one that has already earned him recognition in the Spanish-speaking literary world.
The novel’s anchor point is a real historical event: Argentine singer Sandro’s landmark 1970 concert at Madison Square Garden, the first performance by a Latin American artist at this iconic venue. Around this cultural touchstone, Solano builds a kaleidoscopic narrative that follows Gloria Mendoza, a 20-year-old Colombian immigrant in New York, and later intertwines her story with that of her unnamed son who traces her steps decades later.
A Structure of Echoes and Mirrors
Solano employs a fragmented structure that sometimes dazzles and sometimes disorients. Rather than following a traditional chronological arc, the novel moves fluidly through time:
- 1970 New York – Gloria attends Sandro’s concert, experiences an emotional breakup
- 1983 Miami – A family vacation marred by robbery reveals cracks in Gloria’s marriage
- 2005 Virginia – Gloria, now nearing 60, confronts another relationship’s betrayal
- 2007 New Jersey – Gloria and her adult son share winter days at a laundromat
This structure creates a sense of lives experienced as memory fragments rather than linear progressions. The son—who occasionally interrupts as first-person narrator—works to reconstruct his mother’s history while finding reflections of his own experience in hers.
The Haunting of Small Moments
Where Solano excels is in capturing the weight of seemingly minor encounters. Gloria’s life is defined less by major plot points than by intensely observed moments of human connection:
- The old man leering at her in La Mallorquina diner while she waits for her boyfriend
- A blind street musician named Moondog whose article she tears from a magazine
- A Korean woman she comforts in a cave after both discover their partners’ betrayals
- The drunken man at a laundromat who asks her to wash his clothes
These “intimate moments with strangers” become Gloria’s philosophy, her way of experiencing the world. The novel suggests that identity is formed not by dramatic events but through these accumulating encounters that leave impressions like “tatters of burning paper.”
The Immigrant Experience Reimagined
Gloria by Andres Felipe Solano offers a unique perspective on immigrant life in America. Unlike many immigrant narratives centered on hardship and assimilation, Solano presents Gloria’s relationship with New York as one of exhilarating possibility:
“If the sacrifice for being here is to forget everything and learn it all over again, I’m ready to accept it… She didn’t know you could have a feeling like this for a city, that you could long for it the way she’s begun to long for New York.”
Gloria’s experience encompasses both the excitement of reinvention and the sadness of displacement. Her boyfriend Tigre’s sudden deportation echoes the novel’s recurring theme of abandoned connections. Years later, when asked why she won’t return to Colombia, Gloria’s response captures the complex relationship with her adopted country: “Where there’s freedom, there’s no abandonment, where there’s freedom, absolute loneliness doesn’t exist.”
The Limitations of Language and Memory
The novel repeatedly returns to the idea that words are insufficient containers for experience. The title of a song Gloria imagines writing—”This Is Where Words Die”—encapsulates this preoccupation. Characters struggle throughout to express what they truly feel, and memories reshape themselves over time.
Solano’s prose (beautifully rendered in Vanderhyden’s translation) has a dreamlike quality that mimics this unreliability, blending observed detail with imaginative flights and occasional surreal turns. Sometimes this approach produces breathtaking results; other times it creates a sense of distance that makes it difficult to connect emotionally with the narrative.
Where the Novel Falls Short
Despite its considerable strengths, Gloria by Andres Felipe Solano is not without flaws:
- Uneven pacing: Some vignettes feel unnecessarily protracted while potentially significant moments are rushed through
- Narrative distance: The multiple layers of narration (son recounting mother recounting her past) sometimes create emotional remove
- Thematic repetition: The recurring motifs of disappointment and failed relationships eventually feel somewhat redundant
- Underdeveloped characters: Several potentially fascinating figures (like Amparo or Carlota) remain sketched rather than fully realized
Perhaps most significantly, the novel occasionally suffers from a lack of narrative momentum. While its fragmentary structure fits its thematic concerns, the absence of stronger connective tissue between time periods sometimes makes for a reading experience that feels more intellectual than visceral.
Connection to Solano’s Body of Work
Gloria represents an evolution in Andrés Felipe Solano’s literary journey. Known for works like Los hermanos Cuervo and his nonfiction Corea, apuntes desde la cuerda floja (which won the 2016 Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana), Solano has established himself as a writer concerned with cultural displacement and the search for identity.
Readers familiar with his earlier work will recognize his talent for atmospheric detail and psychological nuance, though Gloria ventures more deeply into the experimental territory of fragmented chronology and shifting narration.
Final Assessment: A Flawed But Affecting Achievement
Gloria by Andres Felipe Solano occupies a space between conventional narrative and poetic meditation. While it may frustrate readers seeking more plot-driven fiction, those willing to surrender to its rhythms will find a novel rich with insight about how we construct ourselves through memory and connection.
Solano’s accomplishment lies in creating a character study that doubles as cultural history—a portrait of not just Gloria but of the immigrant experience across decades of American life. The novel suggests that identity is never fixed but constantly reimagined through the stories we tell ourselves about our past.
Though inconsistent in its execution, Gloria by Andrés Felipe Solano contains moments of genuine brilliance that linger in the mind. Like the fragmentary memories it portrays, the novel’s power accumulates gradually through its juxtapositions and resonances rather than through dramatic revelation.
For Readers Who Enjoyed:
- Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
- In the Distance by Hernan Diaz
- My Name is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende
- Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli
- The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugrešić
Key Strengths:
- Atmospheric evocation of New York across different eras
- Insightful exploration of immigrant identity
- Beautiful, often poetic prose
- Innovative structure that mimics memory’s workings
- Culturally significant historical touchpoints
Drawbacks:
- Sometimes lacks narrative momentum
- Emotional distance from characters
- Uneven development of supporting cast
- Occasionally repetitive themes
- Some sections feel overextended while others feel rushed
Solano has created a novel that, like its protagonist, refuses simple categorization. Gloria demonstrates that our lives are not linear narratives but collections of moments that we continually rearrange to create meaning. If the novel sometimes frustrates in its execution, it nevertheless offers a thoughtful meditation on how we construct identity through place, memory, and human connection.
For readers willing to embrace its unconventional approach, Gloria by Andres Felipe Solano provides a moving exploration of how we carry our histories with us even as we reinvent ourselves in new landscapes. Though it may not satisfy all readers equally, it establishes Solano as a distinctive voice in contemporary Latin American literature whose work merits wider attention in translation.
