Envy

In a quiet hamlet of the Colombian countryside, all is peace and harmony—until we begin to notice the details.

A city-born teacher arrives in a Boyacá village to teach at the rural school and, deep down, to grieve the loss of her mother. Her landing in that cold, barren landscape, inhabited by a small farming community on the edge of a reservoir, becomes an intimate and transformative experience. In the transparent air of the páramo, human feelings and contradictions emerge with clarity: love, fear, loneliness, solidarity, cruelty, tenderness… and envy, that “sorrow at another’s good,” that “longing for what one does not possess.”

What makes the reading so captivating has to do with the plot, yet goes far beyond it: what happens to the characters flows with the naturalness of herons in flight, or the silent day of a fisherman on the reservoir.

This novel unfolds with the precise cadence of events, wrapped in the calm of the highlands where countless subtle worlds throb, perceptible only to the narrator’s meticulous gaze. The fragile spectacle of existence, which can only be conveyed by a sensitivity willing to observe life just as it is.