The obsession with women is essentially passive and pacifist - the opposite of the violence - but, looking at Geraldina later, Ismael thinks that "she wants to be looked at, admired, pursued, caught, turned over, bitten and licked, killed, revived and killed again for generations". It's not true, and he wouldn't want it to be, but if the women represent peace then this is 70 years of Colombian history speaking. The descriptions of the twin forces of sex and violence are, through the prism of old age, at once clear and detached. They are the centre of the novel, poetic and utterly convincing.

When the violence descends from the surrounding hills into the town itself, Geraldina and Ismael are among the few who, paralysed by the wait for kidnapped loved ones, cannot flee. Spanish critics of the book have noted that the resulting scenes owe a debt to Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, with its narrator who arrives in a town in search of his estranged father, but finds only the ghosts of the dead pleading for prayers.

Ismael is also a soul not unlike the grandparents that Uribe imagined in 1902. The difference is that after a further century of violence, the capacity to say how or why has been lost. This old man, as exhausted as the country he lives in, can only bear witness. It is a story of horror and despair, beautifully told.