Publication Date: July 12, 2022
Print Length: 320 pages
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
National Book Award for Nonfiction Finalist
Best Book of the Year (Time, NPR, People, Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, Esquire)
Previous Publications
Fruit of the Drunken Tree (2019)
SYNOPSIS
Born into a family of renowned healers, fortune-tellers and seers who talk with the dead, Ingrid Rojas Contreras becomes determined to learn more about her family’s gifts when she returns to Colombia with her mother to give her grandfather a proper burial.
Contreras’s grandfather, Rafael, was a curandero (or shaman) who made his living telling fortunes and healing his neighbors, gifts he passed down to Contreras’s mother, Sojaila. Both could talk with the dead, tell the future and heal the sick. In addition, Sojaila had the ability to appear in two places at once.
While exploring her family’s gifts, Contreras details Colombia’s broader history of colonialism and political violence, forces that led her immediate family to emigrate to the United States. Yet, as Contreras sets out to understand, traces of the family’s indigenous culture remain in a spiritual heritage that persists despite the family’s distance from their home country
REVIEWS AND AUTHOR INFORMATION
Salazar, Miguel, “Descended from Shamans and Ghost Whisperers,” The New York Times, July 8, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/06/books/ingrid-rojas-contreras-the-man-who-could-move-clouds.html.
Bosher, Rosa, “The Man Who Could Move Clouds is a Memoir Full of Magic,” The Washington Post, August 11, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/08/11/ingrid-rojas-contreras-memior-review/.
Chaffa, Mandana, “The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, National Book Critics Circle, February 22, 2023. https://www.bookcritics.org/2023/02/22/the-man-who-could-move-clouds-by-ingrid-rojas-contreras/
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
In what ways has Colombia’s history of colonialism and the suppression of the country’s native culture impacted Contreras’s family? How were the native ways able to persist despite this suppression?
How does the conflict in Contreras’s family reflect the tensions within Columbia between Indigenous spirituality and institutionalized religion?
What is the source of Contreras’s grandfather’s ability to heal his neighbors and improve their lives? Does Contreras make a convincing case that his gifts were authentic?
In what ways do Contreras’s experiences of trauma and migration continue to resonate in her day-to-day life?
