Overview
The Book of Emma Reyes is an autobiographical memoir composed of twenty-three letters written by Colombian painter Emma Reyes to her friend, the historian and critic Germán Arciniegas, between the 1960s and the 1990s. Originally published posthumously in 2012, it was translated into English by the novelist Daniel Alarcón and published by Penguin Classics in 2017. Set in early 20th-century Bogotá, the book recounts Reyes’s childhood: abandoned with her sister in a windowless room, surrendered to a Catholic convent housing 150 orphan girls, and kept illiterate until she escaped at nineteen. It is a memoir of extreme deprivation, written with painterly precision and without self-pity.
Book Review
Early in Emma Reyes’s memoir, there is a moment when Emma and her sister Helena are locked in a room. They are not just sent to their room; they are truly locked in. There is no water, barely any light, and no one is coming. They stay there for months, maybe even longer. Emma cannot be sure, since no one has taught her how to measure time. She has no words for what is happening, but she still describes it with a detail that leaves the reader stunned.
I picked up this book not knowing what to expect. Imagine a stranger at the Bogotá Book Fair, handing Daniel Alarcón a copy and saying, “You must read this. You have to.” That kind of urgency makes me curious. I was drawn in before I even read the first page.
Emma Reyes was born in Bogotá in 1919, an illegitimate child at a time when that label shaped a whole life. Can you imagine being marked from birth? Abandoned in a Catholic convent, she and her sister were given the hardest chores: scrubbing floors, mending laundry, washing pots. They were even denied baptism, because the Church saw them as daughters of sin. Her father was a mystery, and for years, so was her mother. She did not know, for a long time, whether the woman who eventually abandoned her at a train station was her mother or a stranger. She was five years old.
But she did have something: her eyes. From the start, everything Emma Reyes truly owned was what she could see. She became a painter and a friend to Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Gabriel García Márquez. Márquez once called her in Paris to say he admired her early letters. Her reaction was anger, because Arciniegas had shared them without her permission. She did not write another letter for twenty years.
That attention is what makes the book extraordinary. Reyes writes about the convent with the same careful, vivid detail she brings to everything: the smell of the dormitory, the feel of wet laundry, the unique presence of a nun who once showed her kindness. There is no anger changing these memories. There is no self-pity, which would be the easiest and most understandable response to a childhood like hers. Instead, we get a clear, honest view from someone who learned to look very carefully because looking was the first form of freedom available to her.
The prose, translated into smooth and clear English by Alarcón, is simple in the way that only very precise writing can be. It doesn’t try to create an effect, and it doesn’t need to. When Reyes describes seeing her baby brother abandoned on a stranger’s doorstep, she is four years old in the story, and you feel that—not because she is trying to manipulate, but because she is exact. She writes down what she saw, what she understood, and what she didn’t. The space between those things is where the book lives.
What is frustrating is that the memoir ends when Reyes is nineteen, as she leaves the convent after stealing the key from its keeper. The final line, “Before moving further into the world, I realized it had been a long time since I was a girl,” is almost perfect. Still, the reader is left wanting more: Paris, the paintings, Kahlo, Sartre, and the French government naming her a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in the year she died. The letters only cover Arciniegas’s childhood, taken from what Arciniegas had. This missing part leaves a gap that the reader can still feel.
None of this takes away from what is in the book. It was published nine years after the author’s death by a small Colombian press and had been a manuscript for over a decade. It found its English translator because a stranger at a book fair grabbed his arm. The book survived because the writing was good enough—quietly, stubbornly, unmistakably good enough—that people who read it felt they had to share it.
Read it in an afternoon. You will be thinking about it for considerably longer.
Emma Reyes (1919–2003) was a Colombian painter and intellectual who lived and worked in Paris for much of her adult life. She forged friendships with major figures of twentieth-century art and letters, among them Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In the year of her death, the French government named her a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. The Book of Emma Reyes was published posthumously in 2012, nine years after her death.
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