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WORK TITLE: The Lucky Ones
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1985
WEBSITE: https://www.juliannepachico.com/
CITY:
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COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.juliannepachico.com/about/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1985, in Cambridge, England.
EDUCATION:Reed College, B.A.; University of East Anglia, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author.
AWARDS:Received Creative Writing International Scholarship, University of East Anglia, 2012.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short stories to Best British Short Stories.
Also contributor to periodicals, including Granta, Newwriting.net, New Yorker, Shooter Literary Magazine, Litro, and Lighthouse.
SIDELIGHTS
While her birthplace is Cambridge, England, Julianne Pachico spent her youth in Colombia. She left the country to attend college. Pachico is an alumnus of University of East Anglia and Reed College, where she earned her master’s and bachelor’s degrees, respectively. She works primarily as a writer, having had her work featured throughout several publications.
In an interview featured on the Oxford Student website, Pachico recounted how her experiences as a child in Colombia form a major influence for her book, The Lucky Ones. The book centers around a group of young girls, each of them the daughters of wealthy cartel families whose lives are affected in different, often disastrous, ways by their families’ involvement in Colombia’s drug trade. Each chapter of the book is presented semi-independently from one another; they all focus on a different major character. Other characters featured in previous chapters continue to make appearances throughout the book in minor roles.
The Lucky Ones’ first chapter stars a young girl by the name of Stephanie. It is summertime, and her parents have decided to attend the party of another rich gentleman. Stephanie, however, did not want to go; instead, she sits at home and tries to find some other way to pass time. What starts off as an innocent, relatively commonplace scenario quickly devolves into something much more sinister. One day, Stephanie wakes up to discover the family’s housekeeper has gone missing. The only other person at her house is a strange man, looming at the front door and knocking insistently to be let in. Stephanie grows afraid, and stays exclusively inside her home for safety. However, the man never leaves, and her parents and housekeeper never come back to the house to help her.
A different section of the book focuses not on human subjects, but on a hutch of rabbits left behind in the aftermath of a vicious cartel raid. The rabbits’ main meal has become the old drug crops still growing on the cartel grounds. In one chapter, Pachico shifts focus to a man who used to teach at the girls’ school. He has been captured and imprisoned deep in the woods, and has been left with nothing to do but run through his old English literature lessons. He builds a class out of forest debris and lectures his “students” on Hamlet, all the while picking at festering wounds on his body. These are the few moments of freedom he’s been allowed for half a decade. Another chapter focuses on a different girl, who has been forced to study abroad rather than stay in her home in Colombia. While she wants to return, her family has warned her that it is too dangerous. She continues to vacillate between denying and coming to terms with the truth about her homeland and its dark history, as well as what is currently happening to the people she loves. In yet another portion of the book, a set of young girls tries to make sense of the death of one of their friends, brought about by a terrible plane attack. They try to act out what must have happened and what their friend experienced in their final moments in an attempt to parse out their feelings.
Chapters continually bounce back and forth in time, touching upon people the girls used to know and how they have been affected by the chaos. Pachico also takes care to examine the lives of the girls themselves. Some girls’ lives have been cut much too short; meanwhile, the survivors are left behind, fragmented, unsure of how to put themselves back together, and trying to make sense of their upbringings.
In an issue of Booklist, Diego Baez remarked: “Pachico’s unapologetically immersive first novel brings life to a South American struggle often forgotten in global headlines.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called The Lucky Ones “[u]nsettling and pulsing with life.” They added that the book is “a brilliantly surreal portrait of life amid destabilizing violence.” Grace Lichtenstein, a reviewer on the New York Journal of Books website, wrote: “The visceral impact of Julianne Pachico’s prose, however, is enough to convince a reader that disorder is only a rock, a knock, or a gunshot away.” On the Atlantic website, Amy Weiss-Meyer commented: “The Lucky Ones is no ordinary coming of age novel, and certainly not your standard wealth-porn fare: ‘Lucky’ is a relative term.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer said: “Pachico has a firsthand connection to the country’s charms and troubles that shines through on every gripping page.” On the Rumpus website, Kim Liao stated: “With the disappearance and murder of so many thousands of Colombians over the last several decades—and now, as the next generations try to heal their country’s gaping wounds and move on—Pachico reminds us of our own privilege and asks us, Who are the lucky ones, really?”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 2017, Diego Baez, review of The Lucky Ones, p. 28.
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2017, review of The Lucky Ones.
Library Journal, January 1, 2017, Lawrence Olszewski, review of The Lucky Ones, p. 92.
ONLINE
Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ (March 6, 2017), Amy Weiss-Meyer, “The Lucky Ones Is No Ordinary Coming-of-Age Novel,” review of The Lucky Ones.
Julianne Pachico Website, https://www.juliannepachico.com (October 13, 2017), author profile.
New York Journal of Books, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (October 13, 2017), Grace Lichtenstein, review of The Lucky Ones.
New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/ (November 2, 2015), Cressida Leyshon, “This Week in Fiction: Julianne Pachico,” author profile.
Oxford Student, https://oxfordstudent.com/ (July 1, 2017), Ella Holden, “Profile: Julianne Pachico.”
Paste, https://www.pastemagazine.com/ (March 23, 2017), Steve Nathans-Kelly, “Colombia, Violence and Julianne Pachico’s The Lucky Ones.”
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (October 13, 2017), review of The Lucky Ones.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net (April 10, 2017), Kim Liao, “The Lucky Ones Are Those Who Do Not Disappear,” review of The Lucky Ones.
Silent Frame, https://www.silent-frame.com/ (October 13, 2017), “Interview: Julianne Pachico.”
Talk Radio, http://talkradio.co.uk/ (March 7, 2017), Luke Dolan, “‘I like books that do something different’–Julianne Pachico on her new book ‘The Lucky Ones’ and her career,” author interview.
White Review, http://www.thewhitereview.org/ (October 13, 2017), author profile.*
Julianne Pachico was born in 1985 in Cambridge, England. She grew up in Cali, Colombia, where her parents worked in international development as agricultural social scientists.
In 2004 she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she completed her B.A. at Reed College in Comparative Literature. In 2012 she returned to England in order to complete her M.A. in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where she was a recipient of UEA's Creative Writing International Scholarship.
She is currently completing her PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at UEA on a fully funded fellowship. She had a short story on the long list for the Sunday Times Prize, and is also the only writer to have two stories in the 2015 anthology of the Best British Short Stories. Her short stories have been published by The New Yorker, Lighthouse, Litro, Shooter Literary Magazine and Newwriting.net, among others. She holds dual citizenship in the U.S. and the U.K.
This Week in Fiction: Julianne Pachico
By Cressida Leyshon
November 2, 2015
Photograph by Hannah Whitaker for The New Yorker; Design by Rodrigo Corral
Your story in this week’s issue, “Honey Bunny,” is about a young Colombian woman who’s living in New York. It opens in a nightclub, as she meets a man and tells him “I’ve got some goodies, if you’re interested,” and the goodies turn out to be cocaine. When did you first start thinking about the story? Did you always know it would start with the scene in the nightclub and the subsequent subway ride home?
When I first started this story, I had no idea it would end up beginning the way it does. In the very first draft, this piece was set in London and had a sci-fi feel to it. I never have any idea what I’m doing when I write (I draft a lot). The final form of this story started emerging after I read two books: Álvaro Enrigue’s “Hypothermia_,” which deals with Mexicans exiled in D.C. (among other things), and “My Colombian War,” _a memoir by Silvana Paternostro, which is very vividly written and had a big impact on me.
The narrator could be easy to dismiss—she’s a privileged rich student with a coke problem. At the outset, do you want the reader to sympathize with her or judge her?
I want readers to observe her and come to their own conclusions. For what it’s worth, I think she’s in a difficult situation—she’s estranged from her homeland, out of touch with her native language and identity. I used to work with elementary-school children in similar situations, kids who only spoke English while their parents only spoke Spanish, and it wasn’t easy for them. You’re caught between two worlds and never really belong to either.
The narrator moved to the United States from Colombia when she was a girl, and her memories of the country of her childhood are fragmented. How did you go about conveying an impression of her life there? How much did you think she would have remembered of her experiences and how much would she have forgotten?
I was influenced by my own memories from my childhood in Colombia, and by certain nonfiction books, like “My Colombian War_.” _I definitely think there’s a deliberate obliqueness to her memories, certain things she’s circling around and not confronting.
_You grew up in Colombia. How old were you when you left? Have you returned much in the years since? What’s it been like revisiting the country in your fiction? Has it changed the way you think about it? _
I left Colombia when I was eighteen years old, when I moved to the U.S. for college. I started writing the collection in 2012, which is when I moved to England to get my masters in creative writing, and that coincided with the longest period of time I spent without returning to Colombia (about three years—before that I’d go back at least once a year). I finally had the means to go back this fall, and it wasn’t strange at all. You just slip back into it—it’s my childhood home, after all. I’m glad I wrote the book while abroad, though. I think the distance and perspective that provided was helpful for me.
Has writing about Colombia changed the way I think about it? That’s a huge question, and I don’t know if I’m ready to answer it—I’ve barely emotionally processed the fact that I finished the book! I do know that I love Colombia and it’ll always feel like home for me, even though I’ll probably never live there again (though never say never...!).
The story is taken from a linked collection you’ve been working on called “The Lucky Ones.” Most of the stories take place in Colombia, from 1993 on, and, in one way or another, they explore the country’s inequalities and its instability, and the impact of guerilla warfare and the drug trade on its citizens lives, both the wealthy and the poor. Did you have a linked collection in mind from the outset? Did you ever think of taking these narratives and turning them into a novel? What did the short-story form allow you to do?
I did have a linked collection in mind from the very beginning, simply because those are the kind of books I love to read, and that became the kind of book I wanted to write. I never thought about turning “The Lucky Ones” into a novel because the fragmented form felt appropriate to me, considering it’s a book about Colombia. Also, writing short stories seemed less scary to me than a novel. I’m working on a novel now and it’s a totally different can of worms. The short-story form allows you to jump around, to explore different perspectives and voices from piece to piece, while a novel asks you to be more focussed._ _
You’re currently living in England. Do the English make the same kind of assumptions about Colombia as the North Americans do in this story?
I’ve met people from both England and the U.S. who’ve said wonderful things about Colombia, as well as sadly ignorant and naïve things. Cocaine has an undeniable role in Colombian history and society, but it’s not the whole story. Recently, I’ve encountered quite a few people from the States who’ve asked for my opinion on “Narcos,” a television drama about Pablo Escobar, which I haven’t watched, so I haven’t been able to comment. I’m glad that a lot more people in general are travelling to Colombia and seeing what it’s like for themselves. It’s a country that’s been through a lot, but the spirit and passion there is unlike anywhere else.
Do you want to watch “Narcos”?
I don't know if I want to watch it, honestly! I feel nervous about it being exploitative, for the sake of providing entertaining action sequences for English-speaking audiences. I do think it’s good that the show has made people interested in Colombia and the ongoing drug war, and ideally it will open up venues for critical and thoughtful debates regarding current drug policies. I might very well end up watching it over Christmas with my family, just so that I can finally have an informed opinion about it.
Profile: Julianne Pachico
ByElla HoldenPosted on 1st July 2017 NICK BRADLEY SHARE TWEET SHARE SHARE EMAIL COMMENTS
I meet the charming author Julianne Pachico one evening in Blackwell’s Norrington Room, where a story from her first book, The Lucky Ones, is to be performed as part of their Short Stories Aloud event. Set in Colombia, The Lucky Ones is a series of inter-linked tales, drawing inspiration from Pachico’s own childhood experiences – she was born in Cambridge, but brought up in Colombia, before moving to the U.S. to complete a B.A. in Comparative Literature in 2004. Now a PhD student on a fellowship at UEA, Pachico has received high praise for her authorial debut, with two individual stories from the collection featured in Best British Short Stories 2015, and one longlisted for the Sunday Times Prize. Yet, in spite of its success, I discover that The Lucky Ones wasn’t always the book she set out to write.
“Initially I was very resistant to the idea of writing about Colombia, because I just felt that would be too easy. When I started writing the book, I had a very different plan and ambition for it – that I was going to write this apocalyptic, science-fiction novel set in South America, and I feel kind of sad that I didn’t. I found my old notes for that book, and I wrote this outline in 2010 where I’m like, ‘the twist ending is going be that everyone’s a robot!’. That might still be a book that I’ll write one day”
Despite these early enthusiasms, it was clear that Pachico was destined for other things, and the influence of her Colombia past proved too hard to resist.
“I guess the lesson was with writing you just have to trust what you find easy to do, so if something is coming out, you just have to trust that. I guess what happened was that writing about Colombia and my childhood memories of living there in the 80s and 90s that was just the story that – it just came out. It was a huge influence on the book.”
Most authors could probably claim some inspiration from childhood, but Pachico has more to draw on than most. Her early experiences in Colombia were worlds away from those of her UK and US readers, elevating them to status surprisingly close to the apocalyptic novel she had originally planned. I suggest that maybe it’s a natural progression from sci-fi apocalypse to the anecdotal, given that it was effectively a warzone supplying her anecdotes.
I guess the lesson was with writing you just have to trust what you find easy to do…
“We were never allowed to go anywhere by ourselves, it was just lying awake at night hearing helicopters, or going to school and hearing this rumour that the Social Studies teacher had been fired because she was supposedly dating this communist guerrilla. Or classmates getting kidnapped, and then moving away. At the time it all just seemed very normal, having classmates where people would whisper, “oh, her dad’s in the cartel – her bodyguards pick her up”, but at the time it just seemed like the reality; it wasn’t really until I moved away that it seemed different to me.
“I don’t want to call it trauma, but I think there is a certain generation of Colombians who grew up during the 80s or the 90s where you were just constantly hearing about bombs going off in public places, or people being kidnapped. You just grow up with this shadow of war and fear that’s present all the time – this sense of menace, this sense of tension that just everything seems normal but at any minute it could just not be normal.”
After her vision of Colombia, the most striking aspect of Pachico’s debut work is its curious form, suspended somewhere between novel and short story collection. Which definition does she prefer? And how she came to adopt this style in the first place?
“I liked the idea of writing a book where the stories were connected; some books that I had in mind were: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, Hawthorn and Child by Keith Ridgway – I was really interested in books that weren’t really satisfying, books that were sort of difficult. I didn’t really want to write a book that gave all the answers about everything that happened to the characters, because that didn’t feel honest to me. Colombia isn’t really a country that gives you the answers, so I wanted to write a book that maybe some people would find challenging or unsatisfying, because as a reader I like feeling challenged. I think I was maybe a little frustrating for my publishers because they were asking me, “how do you see this? Is this a short story collection? Is this a novel?”. You can call it whatever you want. Actually, in the States its being marketed as a novel, but to me, I don’t really care what people call it because that was sort of my intention from the beginning to write something that was both.”
With this in mind, I wonder how she feels about the publication of some of her stories – Honey Bunny, Lemon Pie, and Lucky – as standalone pieces in magazines and online?
“After some of the editing process the stories became more linked, so I think there are versions of stories that are different. So I would say that definitely to have the stories be published as standalone I would have to remove certain passages and make adjustments to make them read better, or to make sense. In a way, I don’t know if I could properly call myself this authentic short-story writer, since I consider my stories to work better when they’re part of a whole. But that’s just what this project ended up being.”
There is a certain generation of Colombians who grew up during the 80s or the 90s where you were just constantly hearing about bombs going off in public places, or people being kidnapped. You grow up with this shadow of war and fear that’s present all the time…
Pachico mentions Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond as a comparably problematic work to define, one labelled as short stories by some, but which she feels firmly to be a novel.
I ask if there were any other particular novels or authors that influenced The Lucky Ones, and am surprised to learn that non-fiction played a big role in the creative process.
“I read a lot of memoirs by people who’d been kidnapped, or used to belong to the guerrilla, I read books by American journalists who were investigating the violence of Colombia, or memoirs by Colombians who had lived there and had left. That was really helpful for me because I wrote this book in England, and at the time I was sort of worried about that; I thought maybe I’d have to go back to Colombia for research, to have first-hand experience of the place, but I think actually having that distance was helpful. I think for the next book I want to go back, but I think for this book it was good having that distance.”
Mention of future writing endeavours inevitably leads me to pry – is she working on any projects currently? And what can fans of The Lucky Ones expect next?
“I’m hesitant to talk about works in progress because my writing changes so much, but I can tell you that some of the things that I’ve been interested in are the wolves of Chernobyl, and the pets kept by cartel members. In my hometown of Cali there’s this shelter on the edge of the city for all these exotic animals that were kept as pets by cartel members, that really don’t have a home now: Lions and tigers that were kept as a status symbol, but then the cartels were disbanded and their owners killed, or imprisoned, or extradited. I don’t know what they mean but I’m interested in them – it’s kind of sad how these lions have been fed marijuana or ecstasy, so they’re brain damaged, or they’ve had their legs cut off, or they were fed human flesh and now no one can go near them. To me it seems like such a sad, random outcome of the drug war in Colombia, now we have all these big cats – what are we going to do with them?
“I was working for a long time on a project that was set on the Mexican border, but I think that has been sort of put aside. I thought I was done with writing about Colombia, but I think I’m not – I sort of have two projects going on now and I’m not sure which one is going to take fruition. It’s a fun thing about writing, not knowing what’s going to happen.”
Whatever topic Pachico chooses, I’m confident it will be a success. Her enthusiasm for her craft is evident (and infectious), and it certainly seems from this interview that she has plenty more stories left to tell.
Colombia, Violence and Julianne Pachico's The Lucky Ones
By Steve Nathans-Kelly | March 23, 2017 | 12:05pm
Author photo by Nick Bradley
BOOKS FEATURES JULIANNE PACHICO
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Colombia, Violence and Julianne Pachico's The Lucky Ones
Note: This piece is the Books Essential in Paste Quarterly #1, which you can purchase here, along with its accompanying vinyl Paste sampler.
In 1999, a history teacher friend of mine moved to Cali, Colombia, to teach at an elite international private school. On his first day, the school’s director handed him a roll of students. Then the director pointed to a group of names on the list and said, “Those kids get A’s.” Sensing the new teacher’s confusion, the director added, “Their families are very powerful.”
Besides adventurous teachers and government contractors, most Americans have little direct contact with Colombia’s wealthy elites or its decades-long civil war, which we regard as the non-domestic front of America’s 40-year War on Drugs. We recall Bill Clinton’s controversial Plan Colombia—which initiated mass fumigation of Colombian agriculture that reportedly hurt more peasant farms than coca plantations; reclassified Colombia’s Marxist peasant guerilla insurgency, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), as a narco-terrorist organization; and poured billions into supporting the lawless paramilitaries fighting the FARC, while doing little to slow the flow of cocaine into the U.S.
American linguist, historian and social critic Noam Chomsky describes Colombia as “a tragic country … plagued by extraordinary violence and terror.” More than a half-century of civil war has yielded 27,000 reported kidnappings, numerous extrajudicial assassinations, and a death count of 220,000—81 percent of whom are civilians. The murders happened so frequently, and with such wide dispersal around the country, that national newspaper El Tiempo began publishing a “Weekly Map of the War” to pinpoint all the places reporting violence each week.
At this writing, Colombia is undergoing a peace process fraught with failed plebiscites, vote-tampering, rampant misinformation, ongoing political assassinations, and tenuous progress signified by the incipient demobilization of the FARC. “To understand what is happening with the Colombian Peace Accords,” wrote Colombian activist and economist Héctor Mondragón in an early December 2016 op-ed, “it is necessary to identify the enormous political power held by Colombia’s large landowners. Without understanding the problem of the concentration of land ownership, it is impossible to understand anything that has happened in the country in the past eighty years.”
Indeed, Colombia is a country characterized as much by colossal disparities in personal wealth as by inescapable political violence. The war-ravaged nation includes both a massively dispossessed peasantry and an agribusiness elite whom decades of war have only made wealthier.
Are Colombia’s monumentally moneyed 0.1 percent the titular “Lucky Ones” of Julianne Pachico’s mesmerizing book? Yes and no. Set in both Colombia and New York against the backdrop of the civil war between 1993 and 2013, The Lucky Ones does concern itself with a handful of young women whose paths converged in a Cali private school in 1993. But as the war and the drug trade intrude on their lives (and those of their relatives, teachers, maids, and boyfriends), the question of what makes anyone lucky in such a dangerous world becomes almost impossible to answer.
Even more than it eschews such easy answers, The Lucky Ones steadfastly eschews ease. Despite Pachico’s luminous writing, the specter of terror, of kidnapping, of who will be taken next makes The Lucky Ones an unsettling read. Its perpetual perch on the edge of disaster—both real and surreal—leaves the reader in a state of dread reminiscent of Nathan Englander’s Argentinian desaparecido novel, The Ministry of Special Cases.
But the genius of The Lucky Ones is that Pachico creates a palpable anguish with a lighter touch than the gloom that hangs over Englander’s book. The Lucky Ones often feels playful, in part because it consists of interlocking short stories that have been shuffled out of sequence, requiring re-assembly to understand how they fit together. It almost seems like a book more easily understood backwards than forwards.
The Lucky Ones begins, appropriately enough, with a chapter called “Lucky.” It describes what appears to be a FARC abduction of a privileged teenage girl that sets the book on its ominous course, but it plays out like a coy seduction, more menacing in its unnerving inevitability than its action.
At the center of the book stands “The Tourists,” an acutely observed study of middle-aged social mores worthy of John Cheever. The story unfolds at a lavish party on a Cali aristocrat’s palatial finca, feeling Cheever-esque in everything except its location. But following a creepy perspective shift—from the party’s frustrated host to an unspecified “we”—Pachico reveals the observer is not alike Cheever’s empathetic, omniscient eye, but rather a band of FARC guerrillas lurking on the party’s fringes. They wait with kidnappers’ resolve for the most opportune moment to strike: “We’ll be watching. We don’t mind. We’re not in a hurry.”
A subsequent chapter captures the party’s aftermath from an angle that highlights an inspiringly askew imagination. “Junkie Rabbit,” a Colombian sequel to Watership Down, picks up the story a generation past the rabbits’ heroic migration, when the hard-earned new warren has degenerated into a crack den.
It’s obvious from these chapters that nothing is conventionally cohesive in The Lucky Ones, with its looping sense of time and fractured narrative structure. But there is an enduring sense of an ungovernable world unraveling, even as the disparate strands of this deeply affecting novel finally converge.
Steve Nathans-Kelly is a writer and editor based in Ithaca, New York.
JULIANNE PACHICO
Julianne Pachico grew up in Colombia and now lives in Norwich. In 2015 she was longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Prize. Her linked collection, THE LUCKY ONES, is forthcoming.
'I like books that do something different' - Julianne Pachico on her new book 'The Lucky Ones' and her career
The video could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.
The author popped by the studio for a chat with Penny Smith about her new book
By Luke Dolan
Tuesday, March 7, 2017
Julianne Pachico swung by the studio for a chat with Penny Smith about her latest book.
The Lucky Ones contains a series of short stories which highlight the dangerous atmosphere of forced kidnappings and executions which haunted Colombia as a result of 20 years of conflict.
Pachico told Penny and listeners the purpose of the book, and reflected on her career as an author.
She said: "If you want to read it as a novel, you can. If you want to read it as a short story collection, you can.
"That was my purpose from the very beginning, to write a book which could function as both. I like books which like to do something different.
"I wanted to show different sides of Colombian society, and be true to my experience of growing up there.
"I've been very fortunate, especially with short stories. It was helpful for me to build up confidence by submitting to different publishers."
Listen to the full interview above.
Read more at http://talkradio.co.uk/news/i-books-do-something-different-julianne-pachico-her-new-book-lucky-ones-and-her-career#u5Q6jrPWL8Ohm1s5.99
Interview: Julianne Pachico
The Brief
Julianne Pachico is a short story writer, whose work has been featured in The New Yorker, The White Review, Granta Magazine, Lighthouse, and Litro. ‘Lucky’ and ‘The Tourists’ were included in Salt Publishing’s anthology The Best British Short Stories 2015, and the former was also longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award 2015. Her debut collection, The Lucky Ones, is published by Faber & Faber (UK) and Spiegel & Grau (USA).
Which book would you recommend to our readers?
Barbara Comyns is an author I’ve really enjoyed discovering. I love her sassy English humour. Sisters by a River is my favourite so far.
Which film would you recommend to our readers?
Departures, directed by Yōjirō Takita. A Japanese film about a cellist who changes careers. A quiet film about ordinary people, the ending had me in tears.
Which essay would you recommend to our readers?
George Orwell will always be legendary, more now than ever. ‘Politics and the English Language’ is essential reading.
Which poem would you recommend to our readers?
‘Ode to the Penis’ by Sharon Olds, from her new collection Odes. It presents a very balanced perspective [on the subject of male objectification].
Perspectives
The following questions relate to our Perspectives column, in which two writers respond to an artwork that they are experiencing for the first time.
Can children make art?
Anyone can! I’m a big believer in this. Age, background, and public exposure don’t matter. An artist is someone who makes art, period.
Does ambiguity make art less relatable?
I think it makes it more relatable. I like not knowing all the answers. I like feeling that the artist trusts me.
Is dreaming a form of creativity?
I sometimes use dreams as scenes in my writing. I recently had a nightmare about Steve Bannon – I definitely won’t be using that one.
States of the Arts
The following questions relate to our States of the Arts column, for which each article includes four artworks that share an association with a single nation or territory.
Which Argentinian artwork would you recommend to our readers?
Mad Toy, a novel by Roberto Arlt. I love its crazed depiction of youth, adventure, and undercover book theft.
Which Colombian artwork would you recommend to our readers?
Any of Doris Salcedo’s visual art. I admire its brutality, beauty, and simplicity.
Which South African artwork would you recommend to our readers?
I’m in awe of Henrietta Rose-Innes’ novel Nineveh, and its glorious celebration of bugs, tough women, and open-mindedness.
The art of discovery
The following questions relate to Silent Frame’s aim to celebrate the art of discovery.
Which artist or artwork do you most want others to discover, and why?
I worry he’s a bit ‘over-discovered’, but in any case, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is a monumental work and a must-read for the twenty-first century.
What question would you like to ask other Silent Frame interviewees?
What do you love about making art?
The Lucky Ones
Diego Baez
Booklist.
113.12 (Feb. 15, 2017): p28.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Lucky Ones. By Julianne Pachico. Mar. 2017.272p. Spiegel & Grau, $26 (9780399588655).
Pachico's volatile debut draws on her experience growing up in Cali, Colombia, an area fraught with paramilitary
violence. Each chapter functions like a self-contained short story, capturing the sociopolitical unrest and its impact on
various, intertwined lives. The tale opens in Valle del Cauca in 2003, after teenager Stephanie Lansky decides to skip a
holiday getaway with her parents, and things at home turn wildly awry as her housekeeper disappears and a strange
man lurks around her front gate. The scene shifts to the Amazon jungle in 2008, where an abducted schoolteacher
named Mr. B struggles to save his sanity by teaching Shakespeare to a class of sticks, leaves, and rocks as a wound on
his hand quickly worsens. A subsequent chapter is set in New York, where a young Colombian woman has turned to
dealing drugs, unable to fully escape the vortex of her home country's turbulence. Occasionally disorienting and
relentlessly rewarding, with traces of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's News of a Kidnapping (1997), Pachico's
unapologetically immersive first novel brings life to a South American struggle often forgotten in global headlines.--
Diego Baez
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Baez, Diego. "The Lucky Ones." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 28. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442495&it=r&asid=89f46522c684e5ff29256041876a20f7.
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Pachico, Julianne: THE LUCKY ONES
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Pachico, Julianne THE LUCKY ONES Spiegel & Grau (Adult Fiction) $26.00 3, 7 ISBN: 978-0-399-58865-5
Set during the bloody height of the Colombian conflict and spanning more than two decades, Pachico's unforgettable
whirlwind of a debut centers around the intersecting lives of a group of wealthy schoolgirls as well as the parents,
teachers, and housekeepers who move in their orbit.It's 2003, and Stephanie Lansky's parents have taken off for the
holiday weekend to attend a lavish party in the mountains of Cali, leaving 17-year-old Stephanie--she herself has
declined the invitation--under the care of their beloved housekeeper. But one day in, and Stephanie finds the
housekeeper gone, the phone lines dead, and a man with a thickly scarred face buzzing ceaselessly at the door. Now
it's 2008, and Stephanie's former eighth-grade teacher, held captive in the Colombian jungle, spends his days teaching
the finer points of Hamlet to a class of leaves and sticks, parasites burrowing into his arms. In Cali, a class of third
graders dutifully writes condolence cards to the parents of a classmate, blown up over the mountains. In New York
City, a Colombian expat has reinvented herself as an American fashion student, dealing drugs to Williamsburg hipsters
and Upper West Side college boys, each tiny bag of powder carrying a remnant of the past she can't seem to escape. A
little girl grows up with a pet lion in a house so opulent there's an indoor fishpond; a young man writes articles about
the links between the government and the death squadrons and has his fingers axed off by masked men with machetes.
Taken alone--and some have been published as such--the chapters work as complete short stories, full worlds as
vibrant and jarring as fever dreams. But together, they form something much larger, revealing a complicated and
morally ambiguous web of interconnecting lives. Unsettling and pulsing with life; a brilliantly surreal portrait of life
amid destabilizing violence.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Pachico, Julianne: THE LUCKY ONES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357382&it=r&asid=c2a5aa441531a7f65fd8e70cf361c37d.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
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Pachico, Julianne. The Lucky Ones
Lawrence Olszewski
Library Journal.
142.1 (Jan. 1, 2017): p92.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Pachico, Julianne. The Lucky Ones. Spiegel & Grau. Mar. 2017.272p. ISBN 9780399588655. $26; ebk. ISBN
9780399588679. F
Set mostly in Colombia between 1993 and 2013 during the periods of guerrilla warfare and infamous drug trade, this
work focuses primarily on the lives of a small group of privileged girls attending a private school. Though promoted
as a novel, it is really a thematically linked collection whose episodic, fragmented structure reads more like a series of
short stories. Since the protagonists are somewhat similar, individual character development is subsumed to that of an
ensemble cast. Often, a minor character in an earlier episode reappears in a major role in a later one in a temporal shift
that may catch readers off guard. For example, Betsy, barely mentioned early on, has moved to Washington, DC,
where she is living with an escaped prisoner in the last chapter 20 years later. VERDICT By using a cross spectrum of
various character types from different walks of life--rebels, teachers, adolescent girls, parents--Pachico, raised in
Colombia and now living in the United Kingdom, re-creates this recently violent period of Colombian history, but her
debut novel is a disjointed kaleidoscope that fails in integrating all the various components. [See Prepub Alert,
9/12/16.)--Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Olszewski, Lawrence. "Pachico, Julianne. The Lucky Ones." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 92. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562328&it=r&asid=9b66e3617acf41887f81f6f4c244c1ea.
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The Lucky Ones: A Novel
Image of The Lucky Ones: A Novel
Author(s):
Julianne Pachico
Release Date:
March 6, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
Spiegel & Grau
Pages:
272
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Grace Lichtenstein
“The visceral impact of Julianne Pachico’s prose . . . is enough to convince a reader that disorder is only a rock, a knock, or a gunshot away.”
Call it a series of interconnected stories set mostly in Colombia. Or call it a mostly realistic novel, jigsaw puzzle-like in structure. Call it a South American tale by a British author raised in Cali. Or, call it an impressive first novel. This fine debut captures—in various senses of that word—what it felt like during the decades-long war involving guerrillas, drug cartels, paramilitary groups, and the government. A settlement was reached last year and Colombian President Juan Manuel Sanchez received the Nobel Peace Prize for ending it, but the terror and alienation linger.
With a sense of class inequality (young women attend private school, wealthy families live behind gated walls, bodyguards are chauffeurs, poor folk live in shacks and walk), Julianne Pachico references everything from ThunderCats action figures to Shakespeare, yet the result is indisputably Colombian.
These tales of innocence and experience begin and end with a group of girls who live in protected villas in the Valle del Cauca. One, Stephanie, decides to remain at home while her family goes to a party at the country estate of a classmate whose father, it later becomes clear, is a drug lord. She is bored. “When she hears the word guerilla she’ll picture a group of men dressed up in gorilla suits, roaming the jungle.” But despite the presence of a maid and warnings from her parents, she is not safe. “She doesn’t know it yet, but there’s something waiting for her. It could be a future or it could be something else.”
The story jumps ahead to the jungle, where an American who had been a teacher at the girls’ private school is now a prisoner of guerrillas who are hardly better off than he is. The teacher waits to be moved, ransomed . . . or killed. To keep sane, he adheres to his own private schedule, reciting Hamlet to a classroom of sticks, trees and rocks. This is the most terrifying story in The Lucky Ones, as parasites worm their way into the body of captives and soldiers alike, scarring them forever.
As the stories progress, we learn that one comandante used to be a scholarship student at the girls’ school. He was a good friend of the drug lord’s daughter. They shared Star Wars comics; he bought her a bikini—and then he said offhandedly “your father is a crook.” She turned on him immediately, suggesting it was good the world “always needs window washers,” mocked his “stupid common peasant expression,” and let him walk away.
Another of the girls winds up in New York, snorting cocaine contaminated with pieces of sticks and leaves. Recalling the party at which candy rained down from the sky, she also ponders how back in Colombia she was taught not to say “war” but “situation,” not “kidnapped” but “forcibly detained.”
The voices are from every corner of society (and a few from the animal kingdom), in every pronoun. Rich and poor, human and not, all are the unlucky ones, trapped and fearful. “I guess she didn’t have a deal with the cartels after all,” says one. “Don’t you mean the guerrillas?” “Maybe,” he says. “Or I could mean the army. Or the paramilitaries. Does it make a difference?”
In the end, much seemingly has changed. Or has it? “Things are much better now —safer—but people are still used to solving their problems differently. They solve them with weapons.” The date on this final story: 2013. The days of “La Violencia” may be over; most Colombians are “safe.”
The visceral impact of Julianne Pachico’s prose, however, is enough to convince a reader that disorder is only a rock, a knock, or a gunshot away.
The Lucky Ones Is No Ordinary Coming-of-Age Novel
Julianne Pachico’s remarkably inventive debut navigates what it means to grow up wealthy amid the reality of conflict in Colombia.
Ajay Verma / Reuters
AMY WEISS-MEYER MAR 6, 2017 CULTURE
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No book, of course, should be judged by its cover—but how to categorize a book with two very different ones? Julianne Pachico’s thrilling debut, The Lucky Ones, billed as “a novel” on the front of the American version and, by its English publisher, as a “collection of stories,” manages the feat of making the question irrelevant. Each chapter is, on the surface, a self-contained story with its own narrator, set in a particular time and place. Yet each story haunts the others—echoing, amplifying, complicating them. One character’s fleeting thoughts turn out to concern another’s deepest trauma; shared memories are cast in contradictory lights. And though every taut chapter clarifies a plot whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts, each remains tantalizingly incomplete.
The Lucky Ones, roiling conventions of form and narrative, starts in 2003, backtracks to 1993, and ends in 2013, with plenty of twists and turns in between. The book revolves around a small cast of wealthy girls who met in kindergarten in an international school in Valle del Cauca, Colombia, in the 1990s. Together and apart, they move toward young adulthood as the book progresses. Their parents are “the oil company executives and the mining company investors … the expats from Belgium and members of the school board.” The girls have maids and chauffeurs and bodyguards; kindergarten birthday parties are “epic affairs.” When trouble comes, they expect to be taken away “in a shiny black car with squeaky plastic seats,” rescued by “the international community.” In reality, such conclusions seldom arrive in the Colombia of the 1990s and 2000s, where even (or especially) the border-flaunting, cosmopolitan elites are vulnerable in the face of kidnappings, guerrilla raids, and worse.
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The Lucky Ones is no ordinary coming of age novel, and certainly not your standard wealth-porn fare: “Lucky” is a relative term. Growing up, whether the girls like it or not, means coming into uneasy proximity with a conflict that wears on, claiming family and friends and teachers. The vocabulary of war becomes the vocabulary of everyday life—and vice versa. “‘The fish are all assassinated,’” one character remembers saying as a young child, “assuming it was synonymous with dead, thanks to the newspapers and TV.” A lieutenant in a guerrilla group tells his subordinates that “‘The task of Simón Bolívar has yet to be completed,’ like it’s a homework assignment.”
In tackling the challenge of delineating childhood life and brutal war, of untangling the ordinary and the extraordinary, Pachico dares to disorient her readers. She blurs dividing lines between haves and have-nots, Americans and Colombians, guerrilla fighters and good guys, and revels in the messy interconnectedness of characters. Her chapters, all told from different perspectives, are told in different narrative styles as well. She deploys the usual third person and first person, but she also ventures the “we” of a third-grade clique—that’s who disarmingly narrates “Siberian Tiger Park”—and she pulls it off. The alpha girl of the group has been killed in an airplane bombing over Thanksgiving break, and her friends, who aren’t sure how to mourn, or what a plane crash feels like (“how can we ever imagine?”), must now rise to the occasion of directing their own play at recess.
In London we’re orphans. Our faces are permanently smudged with coal dust, our knees rubbed red and raw from clambering up the side of brick buildings. We tap-dance down alleyways, sing the choruses from VHS copies of Oliver! And Mary Poppins, and leave our chimney sweep brushes behind in the library cubbyholes.
Through fantasy, they push forward as a group, the only way they know. Pachico also explores the distances that open up between consciousnesses. The “you” who is the subject of “The Bird Thing” is a maid whose employers we recognize from other chapters but whom she never calls by name. (“You carry the tray out to the swimming pool, where the daughter is splashing and playing Little Mermaid.”) In one chapter, a starving rabbit speaks as “I.” In another, readers learn that the “he” we’re following is quite literally being followed by those doing the telling, who darkly confide that “He doesn’t see us, but we’re watching.”
Pachico makes a point of enlisting the reader in the work of recollecting.
As the novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez said last year about his country, Colombian adults and children alike “have grown up in the midst of fear, of anxiety, of the noise of war.” How, then, to make meaning from this noise? Pachico, who grew up in Colombia with a British mother and an American father, seems to have accepted a metaphysical dare to tell a violent story that, for its characters, has no clear beginning or end. In a chapter called “Lemon Pie,” a kidnapped American expat who taught at the international school says of his plight, “It’s hard to know at what point it became What Happened.” He thinks about the question a lot, replaying the series of events that landed him, isolated and delirious, in a remote corner of southern Colombia.
There is a different teacher in the novel who, after his own perilous encounter with a machete-wielding motorcycle gang, hopes he can forget the entire incident. “If he tries hard enough, the memory might just start to fade,” Pachico writes. “It might be like it never happened at all.” He’s not the only one who wills himself to look away, who tries to leave the country or avoid thinking about how things might have been different. But even the characters eager not to remember—and The Lucky Ones includes many of them—can’t seem to escape the past, which stubbornly reasserts itself.
Pachico makes a point of enlisting the reader in the work of recollecting. Details recur, sometimes bearing a hint of the surreal, as clues to guide us onward. Near the beginning, a strange man shows up at the door while a teenage girl is home alone, asking her if she’s ready “to run.” For her, his presence “feels like noticing the shadow of her own half-closed eyelid, something that has always been there and should have been seen at least a thousand times before.” Later, his exact words are repeated (or are they prophesied?) in the maid’s memory of her own mother’s eerie warning years before: “If you’re not careful, they’ll come for you. Knocking on your door, ringing at the bell. ‘I’m here for you,’ they’ll say. ‘Are you ready to run?’” In Pachicho’s pages, What Happened is still happening.
“History is and is not ephemeral; situations and events evaporate, but their moral and intellectual residue does not,” Cynthia Ozick wrote in the introduction to her collection of essays Quarrel and Quandary. In The Lucky Ones, Pachico has shaped that residue into constantly surprising form. History, she recognizes, is only the beginning.
The Lucky Ones
Julianne Pachico. Random/Spiegel & Grau, $26 (272p) ISBN 978-0-399-58865-5
Pachico’s history-bound debut novel is a carefully yet fiercely composed collage of voices that bears witness to the executions, forced disappearances, and other atrocities that took place in Colombia from 1993 to 2013 during the country’s violent civil war. The book provides a searing glimpse into the conflict through 11 interconnected short stories—each focusing on a different aspect of the struggle. The novel’s riveting first installment, “Lucky,” takes place in 2003 and sets an ominous tone. In it, a young girl is holed up inside her family’s mansion while they’re away for the weekend. What she doesn’t know—but begins to suspect as she hears a knock at the door—is that they’re never coming back. In “Lemon Pie,” one of the strongest vignettes in the book, an American former middle school teacher has been held captive by the FARC for “five years, eight months, two weeks, and five days.” When not locked in a shed, he passes the time via sessions of “Parasite Squishing” and by delivering lectures from memory on Hamlet and The Scarlet Letter to his class of twigs, leaves, and trees in the Amazonian jungle. The most unique story is “Junkie Rabbit,” a twisted glimpse into a rabbit warren filled with bunnies subsisting on the last remnants of coca plants from a ransacked estate. Having lived in Colombia until she turned 18, Pachico has a firsthand connection to the country’s charms and troubles that shines through on every gripping page. (Mar.)
THE LUCKY ONES ARE THOSE WHO DO NOT DISAPPEAR
REVIEWED BY KIM LIAO
April 10th, 2017
“There is no period so remote as the recent past.” —Alan Bennett, The History Boys
Colombia’s history over the last half a century is usually pretty hazy for Americans, whose knowledge of the region usually includes romanticized versions of Pablo Escobar’s life, some generalized anxiety about cocaine drug cartels, and perhaps a faint understanding of the rise of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the right-wing paramilitary groups who also violently clashed with the Colombian government. Some of us even heard about the recent peace accord signed this past year between the leaders of the FARC and the Colombian government, which is the first step to healing a decades-long specter of violence, terror, and fear among Colombian citizens.
Yet how do we understand Colombia’s recent past from our current vantage point, before history pins down the winners and losers, or designates heroes and villains?
Julianne Pachico tackles this difficult question in The Lucky Ones, painting the last twenty-five years of Colombia as an unsettling dreamscape where her characters tangle on a daily basis with very real threats to seemingly safe enclaves.
In the first story, “Lucky,” a teenage girl finds herself completely alone after she decides not to accompany her family to a weekend party in a country home in the mountains, and no one ever returns. After several days, a strange man knocks on the door, and though she refuses to let him in, he becomes a lurking fixture outside and her home a claustrophobic prison. As the days go on:
A frothy panic will start to rise in her stomach, making her hands shake, and when that happens, she can’t control herself; she dashes to her room and peeks out through the window, holding the curtain close to her face like a veil. He’s always there, still in the scratchy poncho, sitting on the grass by the bristly hedge. Leaning against the banana tree. Pacing, mouth moving as if talking to himself, arms swinging exaggeratedly as if mocking army marches… If she squints her eyes, he multiplies into blurry doubles, triples, quadruples. There are dozens of him, an army.
The Lucky Ones is not a historical novel—it does not seek to explain, frame, or even narrate the connections between characters through time and space. Rather, it is a web of intersecting snapshots that makes the contemporary lives of its characters feel incredibly immediate and also surreal. Its dream-like qualities maintain an engrossing tension as the characters’ lives crisscross like a cat’s cradle.
In one of the strongest vignettes in the book, “Honey Bunny,” a character sent away to school in America searches for photos of Cali on Google Earth, and her longing for her hometown is palpable. She wants so badly to remember every detail and yet can’t quite face the reality that many of her friends and family members were abducted and never heard from again:
Charred kernels of grilled corn, burnt black and stiff. Squishy papaya seeds, moist and fresh. The time she told her grandmother, ‘The fish are all assassinated,’ assuming it was synonymous with dead, thanks to the newspapers and TV. The cracked sidewalks. The men puckering their lips and making wet kissing sounds. The accordion music blasting from the maids’ rooms at the back of the house… It makes her think of fables the maids used to tell her: the paisa farmer who went to heaven, la patasola and la llorona. Ghosts who would come knocking on your door, ringing your bell, long dead souls with scarred faces, wandering the country with no name and no past. If you unlocked the door for them, they would wrap their hands around your wrist and lead you away, make you vanish into thin air, disappear without a trace. If you were unlucky, no one would even remember your name: your real one, the one that everyone called you.
Each new perspective refracts the fragility of any seemingly stable situation during a time when attacks could come out of nowhere from a host of equally plausible attackers. In “Armadillo Man,” a character suggests an encounter with the cartels, and when the other asks, “Don’t you mean the guerrillas?” he responds, “Maybe… Or I could mean the army. Or the paramilitaries. Does it make a difference?”
In addressing the question of how to most authentically render this recent moment in history—when we consider that the peace agreement between the FARC and the Colombian government was just signed this past year, and the rebels are currently disarming in transitional zones as we speak—Pachico’s intersecting web of perspectives is extremely appropriate, offering little closure and evoking the destabilized echo of lives upended.
Yet I hesitate to call The Lucky Ones a novel, even though that is the label slapped onto it by its sales-minded publisher. In my mind, as a reader and a writer, a novel implies that even when narration shifts between character perspectives, there is an omniscient, God-like narrator governing the tone and arc of the story, guiding us towards its inexorable conclusion. While there are novels that break all of these rules, in The Lucky Ones, there is no God. Pressing too hard on the label “novel” threatens to short-change this wonderful kaleidoscopic short story collection, which leaves as many gaps between characters as linkages, and asks as many questions as it answers. Instead of framing the history of Colombia and packaging it or explaining it to us, what Pachico offers is an anthropological view of small, beautifully evoked human experiences—an ethnography of survival, memory, and nostalgia.
Pachico calls her collection The Lucky Ones, and while a few of her characters are lucky in the sense that they made it out alive, others are lucky only in that their names and stories are remembered by others. To be lucky is to be missed, to be noted, and to have your existence catalogued. With the disappearance and murder of so many thousands of Colombians over the last several decades—and now, as the next generations try to heal their country’s gaping wounds and move on—Pachico reminds us of our own privilege and asks us, Who are the lucky ones, really?