The Violence of Human Folly in “You Glow in the Dark” by Liliana Colanzi – Chicago Review of Books

Radioactivity haunts Liliana Colanzi’s short stories. In You Glow in the Dark, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, real-world poisons seep into her characters and their communities, and violence simmers in the air. Despite people’s attempts to reach for better, the world’s sharp edges tend to find them.

Colanzi’s landscapes draw from corrupt, dark governments and real-life pollution events. The title story draws from an accident in the town of Goiânia, Brazil. In 1987, a radiotherapy unit was stolen from a long abandoned hospital by two men hoping to get money for the equipment. The material went from scrapyard to scrapyard, which was dangerous enough in its way—but it became disastrous when one man punctured the capsule, revealing a beautiful blue glow emitting from the substance inside. 

The substance inside and the open capsule were now out in the world, and contamination continued until one woman finally made the connection between the glow and all of them getting sick, and went to the hospital with the capsule in hand. In the end, four people died and almost 250 were contaminated. The clean-up involved tearing down homes and incinerating everything in them.

But the psychological impact wrapped around the entire region. The incident caused widespread fear, as thousands worried they were infected or contagious. The region’s exports were banned, and people found it impossible to truly leave it behind.

Colanzi’s stories reflect that malaise. In her tales, violence is something in the air or soil, something ready to take us over or occupy our lives at any moment. Her world brims with tension, a true thing born of historical occupation and violence. In “Atomito,” a town wastes under the impact of the nuclear power plant that the company promised would bring them only jobs and prosperity. Protestors are met with police brutality and surveillance, and the youth of the town struggle to find joy in the collective despair of their community. 

But it isn’t just the tension of violence—the stories highlight an intrinsic kind of foolishness that follows humans wherever they go. Why would that man puncture the capsule? What sense of wonder led him to give the glowing material to others? Why do humans do anything, but to taste small wonders, to push at the limits of what we know? 

Colanzi’s characters are either curious, burnt out from the impact of someone else’s curiosity, or trapped within the confines of someone’s attempt to keep them within certain bounds. A group of youths use tech or dreams to see over the strict rules and walls of their closed community. Young women deal with unexpected pregnancies and the shame that comes with it after their experimenting. 

“C-c-curiosity is the D-d-d-devil’s l-l-ure,” says the protagonist’s mother in “Chaco,” warning him against questioning his grandfather’s strange mutterings. But when the young boy can’t stop wondering what an Indigenous Mataco man on the street is dreaming of, he ends up possessed by the man’s spirit, by a spirit charged with simmering violence ready to be unleashed.

In You Glow in the Dark, characters make deals with the Devil, puncture the capsule to dig out the blue glow inside. Their curiosity for the unknown, for what they don’t yet have, outweighs anything their often-bleak communities have to offer them. Protagonists are lured by the same human folly that led people to try and take new worlds, to think they could control nuclear power in the first place.

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Colanzi’s form is mirrored in that same atmosphere of curiosity. The magical realism of her stories makes the reader want to dig deeper to figure out what’s going on, even as they’re tempted to cringe away from the small, ruthless body horrors that dot her short book. 

In this context, the most interesting story might be the first, “The Cave.” This tale’s protagonist is not a person but a cave that sees centuries of births and rebirths. A young hunter gives birth unexpectedly in the cold; an old man comes to let his body decompose; a European friar sneezes and his germs kill a centuries-old species of mutated bat. In the face of human folly, the cave stays what it is, a witness to comings and goings, lives and deaths. 

In a book so focused on the tendency for humans to ruin and destroy, it serves as a reminder that maybe all but our most lasting damage are impermanent in the long run—a bleakly hopeful idea to propel readers through Colanzi’s more chaotic tales of destruction to follow. The collection strikes an overall tense tone with small notes of this sort of existential optimism, as people continue to reach and fail in a world of nuclear power and toxins, and yet the world persists.

FICTION
You Glow in the Dark
By Liliana Colanzi, translated by Chris Andrews
New Directions Publishing
Published February 6, 2024