"And I said
"What do you do with the pieces of a broken heart?
"And how can a man like me remain in the light?"
- M. Ward, Chinese Translation


I couldn't help, unfairly, thinking about a film I watched recently which also meditates on the intimate intricacies of a marriage breaking. Our Time, by the inimitable Carlos Reygadas, overlaps with Robayo's piece in discouraging ways. The film far surpasses this work because although Reygadas is equally willing to expose the dark underbelly of sometimes violent difference between a husband and wife as they suffer irreconcilable drifting, Reygadas is able to apply this drama to many areas of human experience including the artfulness of the very film itself as one views it. It is sprawling and messy but it works very hard to find a catharsis for its characters.

Holiday Heart, which I found irrideemably ugly, makes no such effort. So the novel becomes a wail of frustration for two characters who are very quick to draw general conclusions about People and Society from their personal experience but unwilling to communicate with each other.

I understand that dissonance, exile, and the naturally bigoted myopia that results is a theme for Robayo but without the further examination of these themes nor any attempt to answer the questions he sets out to ask I wonder if the author is really using the entirety of his canvas or if this novel is just a very long short story in disguise.