This book is a fascinating read, even for someone like myself who comes at Latin American drugs from a non-literary angle, and who is not even that familiar with the sort of novelistic chronicles about drugs that it considers. The central problem for Gabriela Polit is the ‘representation’ of violence – that is, the complex of moral dilemmas faced by Latin American writers who are increasingly engaged in writing about drugs and drug violence. The book is anything but a facile paean to the popular social phenomenon of ‘narco-culture’ that has gained notoriety in recent years, and it avoids the sensationalistic writing usually seen about drugs. Indeed, the ethical struggle of these writers is precisely to contest the glorification of blood and violence, without replicating it, in their process of narrating an inescapable part of the recent history of countries like Mexico and Colombia. Another artistic challenge is to address as public memory the authentic pain of the victims of this wave of violence, going beyond traditional cults of victimhood. I liked the author's novelty in closely comparing the two vibrant regional capitals of literary drug culture, the paisas of Medellín in Colombia and the culichis of Culiacán in Mexico. While the book draws on literary and cultural debates, it is also strongly informed by an ethnographic process of engaging many of the writers in their own social fields. Polit shares her first-hand experiences and reflections with readers, without fanfare or self-promotion.

Following a lucid introduction, Polit draws out a fine-grained historical context: how the two places, Culiacán and Medellín, ended up as epicentres of drug trafficking violence, via two different paths. One, Medellín, is now moving away from its traumatic past, but the other, Culiacán, remains in the present vortex of the Mexican drug war. In the second chapter Polit uses three novels as a prism through which to view Culiacán's condition and literary scene. Elmer Mendoza, Culiacán's most celebrated writer of noir crime novels (detective stories inevitably rich in drug-related events and characters), is the protagonist of chapter 3. Chapter 4 then turns to an investigative journalist, Javier Valdez Cárdenas, who penned a well-known book about female traffickers (Miss Narco), and a Sinaloan painter, Lenín Márquez, who gives image to the symbolic violence that infuses modern Sinaloan life. Here, there is a brief discussion of scholarship on narco-culture. Chapter 5 pauses, if fleetingly, on representations of rustic sierran northerners in the novels of Mexico City writers such as César López Cuadros and Alejandro Almazán. Chapter Six then takes us to Colombia, starting with the myriad narratives of sicarios (youthful street assassins) produced in Medellín by a gamut of cultural figures, including the novelist of despair, Fernando Vallejo (La Virgen de los Sicarios), and the sociologically attuned eclectic, Alfonso Salazar. In chapter 7, we meet Dario Jaramillo, who explored the moral impact of sudden wealth on the lives of paisas. Gender and sexual themes dominate chapter 8, which concerns a writer, Héctor Abad Faciolince, who has written autobiographically about the murder of his own father, a respected human rights leader from the 1980s. The book ends, before a reflective epilogue, with a chapter on the stereotyping urban art of a paisa photographer, Juan Fernando Ospina.

Many will agree with Polit that a ‘perverse effect’ of drug violence is its inspiration for enduring artistic work that ponders the tragic impact on human lives, relationships and indeed entire societies. While the book raises larger questions, Narrating Narcos is most of all devoted to exploring these writers and artists as social actors and people trying to make representational and ethical sense out of the onslaught of pain and bloodshed that accompanies trafficking and state violence in these locales. They speak eloquently for themselves in Polit's many personal encounters and dialogues. For some readers, the literary style of Narrating Narcos may appear ensayista, flitting from theme to theme, from dwarf chapters to over-sized ones. Others may wish for less genuflection to great theorists (Bourdieu, Benjamin, Gilman, Žižek) and more attention to the concrete social influences or links between ‘low’ or vulgar narco-culture and these serious or ‘high’ narco-intellectuals. Others might covet a more decisive analysis of the genre itself, an emerging kind of neo-realism sometimes attributed to the dystopic visions of neoliberalism, which supersedes the storied ‘magical realism’ of Latin America during the semiotic and real violence of the Cold War era. But I like the book as it is: anchored to a real sense of these writers and the morally daunting realities of narco trafficking and the drug war.