Fernando Vallejo and heretical thinking in La puta de Babilonia

Abstract

The publication of La puta de Babilonia, by the Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo, is another turn of the screw in his acid and corrosive vision of Catholicism, without neglecting other religions such as Protestantism, Mormonism, or that represented by the millions of followers of Islam. Viewed as a monumental antireligious diatribe, La puta de Babilonia is an anticlerical and irreverent work, an antitheological palimpsest in which the Antioquian novelist shows his solid religious education, while he displays a sharp Voltairean instinct for blaspheming and eroding the longstanding pillars of religious culture and realizes a passionate defense of the carnal world.