An Orgiastic Outburst of Violence and Bloodshed | Evelio Rosero’s House of Fury
Bogotá’s Teatro Colón is the oldest opera house in South America, which means it’s extremely likely that Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro has been staged in the city dozens of times since the theater first opened its doors in 1892. (Figaro has run in nearly one of every five seasons at the continent’s more storied Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, which has the benefit of an extensive online performance database.) In addition to its crackerjack music and some of Mozart’s most gorgeous arias, Figaro’s popularity relies on a Lorenzo Da Ponte libretto that creatively mines the comedic and dramatic potential of upstairs/downstairs class dynamics in numerous permutations. The action is largely limited to the lavish home of the count and countess, which enables easy interaction between the royal couple and their many servants—maid, valet, housekeeper, gardener—as well as any visitors who pop by to render their services. Add in a festive celebration in the titular wedding, some messy (and admittedly creepy) amorous entanglements, plus a couple of ludicrous bumblers and the stage is set for an evening’s worth of amusement that even makes progressive, if subtle, points about social justice and female empowerment.
For its first hundred pages or so, Casa de furia—the 2022 novel by Colombian author Evelio Rosero—had me thinking that I was settling into a Figaro-type farce set in Bogotá. Newly available in Victor Meadowcroft’s English-language translation titled House of Fury (New Directions, 2025), the novel takes place almost entirely at the sprawling home of Nacho Caicedo and Alma Santacruz, who are hosting a lavish anniversary party featuring a live orchestra and a menu that includes everything from goat stew to veal to a seemingly never-ending supply of the roasted pork dish called lechona. The powerful magistrate and his former beauty queen wife have six daughters, ages seventeen to twenty-seven, as well as a live-in maid, cook, gardener, and chauffeur. The morning of the party, one of those daughters learns she is pregnant and another discovers that her secret fiancé is publicly engaged to someone else. Then Alma’s black sheep brother shows up—despite being explicitly not invited to the party—followed closely by her drug-dealing cousin, riding on a white mule. Let the laughter, tears, and recriminations sing forth! But what starts as an opera buffa soon becomes a pitch-black comedy before descending into full-on Grand Guignol, an orgiastic outburst of violence and bloodshed that would make Quentin Tarantino proud.
Among the scores of characters who move in and out of the novel, including a steady stream of party guests that the neighbors memorably describe as “the most sublime idiocy,” probably two dozen have significant storylines, making House of Fury an unwieldy novel to encapsulate. Among the more prominent narratives, however (especially early on), are those of the Caicedo Santacruz children. Uriela is the family genius, but at seventeen, she also remains the most wayward daughter: “She could be good at anything, and yet, for that very reason, believed she was good for nothing.” She is already eccentric, dressing for the party in an Indigenous “Guajiro Indian robe” and hiding away all sorts of exotica in her room, including a shrunken head, fossils, and a pet turtle. Uriela dreams of going “far away in the world, and even far away from the world itself.” Nineteen-year-old Italia, “the most beautiful” of the daughters, is the one who has fallen pregnant, and even though she runs off with her boyfriend, she leaves a note for her father revealing that she doesn’t really want to have the baby. Lisboa, a twenty-five-year-old nursing student, falls under the spell of a baritone twice her age. And Francia, the oldest, can’t decide whether to focus on punishing her two-timing fiancé or embracing her cousin’s amorous advances.
Whether through the girls’ stories or those of the other partygoers, House of Fury makes consistently insightful and often damning observations about Colombia’s history, patriarchal society, justice system, and relationship to the Catholic church while also satirizing the scourge of machismo, the early drug trade, and a host of issues involving family and class dynamics. The story takes place on Friday, April 10, 1970, just nine days before an ultimately disputed nationwide election that was the last held under the National Front, the two-party power-sharing agreement that put an end to Colombia’s decade-long civil war known as La Violencia. That war began with a 1948 assassination that left the population “like a river that bursts its banks . . . dedicated . . . to getting drunk and setting fires, and still the city had not recovered: everywhere, there was scorched brickwork; Bogotá sounded like a ravaged heart.”
The novel’s most frequent appraiser of the Colombia that would ultimately emerge in the wake of the National Front is sixty-year-old Nacho, who has a reputation as a bit of a “philosopher and soothsayer.” Nacho’s premonitions are often broad, even if they are unmistakable, as with his insight into what would become one of his country’s most enduring perils: “The grim reality of kidnappings was barely dawning, yet Nacho Caicedo had already received warning from the future about the abductions that would grip the country like daily bread.” As Nacho’s storyline in the novel is winding down, he unspools a bleak, pages-long litany of sorrow that he foresees in which “the whole country is a cemetery, no one dies of old age, torture, the gunned-down, ghosts of victims fill the air.” The magistrate is far from the only character to pass judgment on Colombia, and even the gatecrashing Uncle Jesús piles on. After blaming several small earthquakes on Mount Monserrate (which he inaccurately characterizes as a volcano, Jesús predicts that “one of these days, [Monserrate is] going to flatten Bogotá, this sinful city, this city worse than Sodom, this city-cum-Babylon, and there won’t be a single stone left standing.”
Central to the city’s debauched reputation in the world of the novel is the Catholic church, depicted as a haven for abusers who perpetuate further abuse, “nothing but the home of that suffering. Its members did not share this openly; it was a secret, but a tacit truth among them.” Such abuse is personified in Monsignor Javier Hidalgo, whose introduction leaves no doubt as to Rosero’s intended message: Hidalgo is “a deflowerer of young boys, a profaner of altar servers, a sodomite, an abuser, an abductor, and a rapist, but also a friend of the magistrate.” Alma does not share her husband’s comity toward Hidalgo, and late in the evening, she publicly excoriates the monsignor and his ilk: “You are the devils. Today, I can only regret that at one time my own daughters were left alone with these men of the cloth, in their duplicitous hands.”
Many laymen also reveal themselves to be primarily concerned with sexual gratification and willing to take extreme means in pursuit of that desire. Alma’s nephews Ike and Ricardo Castañeda, “a pair of strange clowns” who have failed upward despite never finishing university, are two such violent abusers; but the epitome is the aforementioned mule rider, Cousin César. A “fat man in his forties,” César is a brute who sees it as his right to have any woman he desires, despite being married to the beautiful and leggy Perla, whom he calls “perra” (bitch). Defending his vocation as a marijuana dealer, César calls it “the business of tomorrow.” But Nacho—perhaps alluding to the violence that will surround Colombia’s future cocaine and heroin exports—pushes back ominously, stating that “tomorrow’s business will be different—and even worse.”
Perla is flawed as well, a “lady drunk,” as she is called by Nacho, though her addiction assuages her worries about her three sons following in their father’s footsteps and maybe even enables her to forget about the women she has paid off after her husband’s assaults. Once the party is underway, Perla attracts three “champions” hoping to take advantage of her impaired state—men who are little better than her husband in many ways, including a magician who has only ever slept with women who were drunk; a cyclist whose new wife is at home pregnant; and a PE teacher who takes advantage of his students.
Meadowcroft does a good job capturing Rosero’s wordplay, like when, early in the novel, the gardener, Lucio, is charged with getting Uncle Jesús away from the party. The instructions he receives, however, sound straight out of a noir film—help “[take] him out,” give him a “one-way ticket,” send him “to the moon”—and Lucio can’t decide whether to take them literally or metaphorically. Another time, Meadowcroft wisely leaves in the original Spanish terms las puras and las putas in order to highlight a pun that wouldn’t have worked with the English phrases “the pure ones” and “the whores.” And he finds the perfect colloquial expression “You shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth” for the drier Spanish phrase “No debemos rechazar lo que nos ofrecen,” or “We should not refuse what is offered to us.”
One great example of the often intractable task of a translator comes with Uncle Jesús’s nickname, which he acquired after having the hospital call his nephews to say that he had died of a heart attack, only for them to show up at his house so he could tell them he was hungry. Because of this long-ago prank, the family started to call Jesús “Desahuciado.” That word is the past participle of the verb desahuciar, which carries three apposite meanings: to declare someone terminally ill, to evict, and to give up hope for. Meadowcroft, in an unwinnable situation, opts for translating the sobriquet as “No Hope,” which makes for an awfully awkward nickname in English: “There was that No Hope, in the fetal position.” I’d be curious if a more colloquial term like “Goner” was ever considered.
Many of the characters in the novel owe their lives or their fate to Nacho and his role within the court system, either because he got them off or got them convicted. Lucio, the gardener, has Nacho to thank for both his freedom and his employment, but Nimio Cadena, who shows up at the start of the novel’s final act, is out for revenge because of what he perceives as Nacho’s mistreatment. In reality, Nimio had committed a crime and Nacho refused to be bribed.
The very nature of and manner in which Nimio expresses his grievances doesn’t win over Nacho—or the reader—but Nimio’s aggression does make the magistrate prostrate himself in the way that so many understandably cower before displays of power and violence: “Go get Nimio Cadena, I’ll absolve him of all blame, Nimio is this country, you can’t condemn the country, Nimio is innocent, he deserves the world’s apology and a whole life’s pension!” While the sentiment is tongue-in-cheek, it also feels like the prognosticator, or even perhaps the author himself, is making a subtle statement about the widespread nature of those who feel aggrieved about the system: “Nimio is this country.”
A similar point is made when the novel is recounting the fates of two uncles, one on Alma’s side, one on Nacho’s, one a Liberal, one a Conservative, representing both parties of the National Front. The men die together, tortured over a low flame, and Rosero writes: “All their lives they had spoken of a violent country, all their lives they had disputed whether it would not be better to call it a murderous country, and yet now it befell them to suffer their country in the flesh, now they came face-to-face with it, now they understood it: this was a country of victims.” A much more sincere version of Nacho’s sarcastic desperation in the face of death, but with a common element. A country of victims. A country of innocents. In light of the uncompromising violence unleashed upon both the deeply flawed partygoers and the completely innocent ones, the assessment is bleak, and very little hope can be found at the end of House of Fury. Uriela—spoiler alert, I suppose—survives the slaughter, but that does not guarantee a bright future in Colombia any more than money or social standing or even knowledge. All it does is leave open the possibility for a face-to-face meeting with tragedy on a different day, in a different way.
Cory Oldweiler is an itinerant writer who focuses on literature in translation. In 2022, he served on the long-list committee for the National Book Critics Circle’s inaugural Barrios Book in Translation Prize. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Star Tribune, Los Angeles Review of Books, Washington Post, and other publications.
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