They last met outside a Lima restaurant in July 2019, and the moment has lingered like a bright yet uncertain memory. Margarita García Robayo wore a smile that felt both summer and winter—a hopeful contradiction that hinted at a life still to be written. Time passed without clear milestones, and telling one’s truth began to resemble breathing itself. In that space between certainty and absence, remarkable books appeared, often dark in mood but radiant in their effect. One such work, La encomienda, is described by the author as a prison and an early morning novel, a surprising arrival in contemporary bookstores.
In this narrative, a young woman who lives far from her homeland and works at an advertising agency confronts the rupture of her hollow routines when her mother unexpectedly visits. García is a non-Robayo, told in the first person, yet her voice anchors the writing’s most intimate and universal sense of self. The writer often notes that the self is a structure, another character, and that truth can be ignored. Writers draw from life and reshape those fragments into narrative material [Citation: author interview].
The life of García Márquez began in Cartagena, a place where the Caribbean sea erases many things, including literary dreams. His family moved frequently, and while he always wanted to write, he pursued law—his father a lawyer, his mother a homemaker—and communications. This path eventually led to the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano, founded by Gabo, where he worked until 2004. He later relocated to Buenos Aires, continuing his work there. Upon arriving, he explored the literary life of Liliana Heker and crossed paths with Samanta Schweblin, a connection that grew into a lasting friendship through shared workshops and conversations [Citation: biographical notes].
More than a decade after García Robayo published her first stories and several novels, she feels she has found a voice that feels stronger and more representative. Confidence has grown, and some things no longer seem as urgent as they once did. Yet there is also a sense that the freshness of earlier attempts might be tempered by maturity. Publication is one outcome among many that a text can achieve, though not necessarily the most meaningful or valuable, according to her reflections [Citation: author commentary].
The novel’s protagonist types on a laptop, reflecting that what is said on the page can be fragile or even damaged. The character laughs and nods as his creator listens to him, listening to himself. There is a belief that once writing reaches paper it may break apart, which makes the creator wary of nonfiction for it often confuses lived experience with recorded truth. Literature, it seems, travels along its own path separate from life itself [Citation: literary philosophy].
García Robayo expresses that books are encounters in themselves, moments a reader can carry forward. She hopes that someday someone might experience something akin to the penalties and rewards found in the works of Rulfo, José Emilio Pacheco, Josefina Vicens, Anne Tyler, Carson McCullers, Natalia Ginzburg, or María Moreno. The writer sometimes disappears into the act of writing, letting the process hold its own mystery and momentum [Citation: literary influences].
Overall, the book is framed as a meditation on voice, memory, and the ways a single life can illuminate broader truths about longing, belonging, and the burden of storytelling. The narrative invites readers to consider how personal history can become a bridge to universal themes, even as it preserves the intimate and particular texture of a single life.