La frontera encantada
Giuseppe Caputo

FICTION | 2025 | 328 pages

In Barranquilla, a child is split in two by his grandmother. “One side of your face is elegant and the other is vulgar,” she tells him in front of a mirror as she traces a line from his forehead to his mouth, conjuring a kind of social spell. Although she tries for the child’s “distinguished” side to shine at all costs, the house sinks into an ever-growing economic crisis: a bankruptcy that causes the father’s mental breakdown and reveals the humble origins the grandmother insists on hiding.

La frontera encantada is the life story that follows after that fundamental incident. It is the profound, disembodied, and endearing exploration of the narrator’s meanderings as the spell grows and begins to manifest in love, sex, and friendship. And above all, it’s the story of the enormous effort that he makes to rebuild a sense of freedom and protection through the joy of the body. Like “a thousand and one coastal nights,” this novel delicately oscillates between fiction, essay, archive, and fantasy. Like a long fairy tale, it condenses the aesthetic and political proposal of Giuseppe Caputo: one of Colombia’s most extraordinary and sensitive authors.

RIGHTS: spanish LITERATURA RANDOM HOUSE

“Few books leave me speechless. Nothing I could say would add up to the healing experience that was reading this novel. Bold, poetic, violent, loving: this is the story of a common wound, and, therefore, of collective consolation. I hope it becomes mandatory reading in Colombian schools. I hope that those of us who have the privilege of entering it know how to honor this gift given to us by an author who is constantly more elevated when it comes to his thinking, perspective, and language. Bravo! Standing ovation for Giuseppe Caputo.”
— Margarita García Robayo
“Giuseppe Caputo writes about the most intimate bonds and urban loneliness like an adventurer in new worlds in search of his own language to narrate the present. He is a poet and a narrator of tenderness and sordidness: I admire him deeply.”
— Mariana Enríquez
“For Caputo, cruelty and beauty are not antonyms but rather the two sides of the same blade of writing that is devastating and subtle, delicate and immense, intimate and social. This story is terribly beautiful: Caputo writes without Manichaeisms, with precision and responsibility, in a sort of complete writing.”
— Pol Guasch
“I loved the way the character’s growth and departures intertwine with such an explicit and profound philosophical and political reflection on the social life of the face, on affections and friendship, on the twists and turns of desire and the pleasure of the body as a territory inhabited by others, on the joy of sex, on queerness. (...) A wonderful, lucid, profound, celebratory, and at the same time devastating dissonance emerges from this tension between affection, tenderness, humor, pleasure, surprise and oppression, injury and alienation. (...) I laughed, I was moved, I celebrated.”
— María Ospina
““In this book of extraordinary beauty, Caputo proposes a dialectical movement to the reader: ‘after telling the story of the wound,’ he says, it is necessary to ‘tell the story of desire.’ And so, he proposes the power of fiction as not only a way to understand the human experience of pain, but also to translate that experience into a political act through acceptance of the fact that on both sides of pain there has also been desire. (...) To the reader, I would like to say that due to the beauty and luminosity of this work by Caputo, due to its rebelliousness and strangeness, La frontera encantada is, in this moment of profound political and social division, an urgent novel.”
— Daniella Sánchez Russo, El Espectador
“I read La frontera encantada as a border novel in which one story calls to another in a flow between literary genres that is capable, all at once and in a beautiful way, of narrating, reflecting, imaginating, theorizing, and poeticizing.”
— Gaceta
“This book is a crossing of narrative paths, a sweet crossroads in which memory, fiction, fantasy, essay, poetic prose, and marvelous tale meet—not to charge and confront each other, but rather to embrace and merge together with care...La frontera encantada proposes a reflection on social classes, on the way the gazes of others sculpt our self-perception, on the different setbacks of desire, on the magic of friendship, and on the reckless rebellion of queer joy.”
— Sergio Alzate, El Tiempo
“Fragment, poetic narration, analysis, illustration (...) with these, the author continues to redefine not only the form of the novel, but also literature itself in this day and in our territory.”
— Paula Andrea Marín C., Revista Corónica