Las Correcciones
by Rafael Reyes-Ruiz
Colombian-American anthropologist, editor, and writer Rafael Reyes-Ruiz has developed a body of academic and literary work rooted in transnational experience, cultural encounters, and a life lived across the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East. This trajectory takes on particular significance in Las correcciones (La Pereza Ediciones, 2025), where geographic and cultural displacement functions not simply as a setting but as an integral part of the construction of identity. The novel begins with what appears to be a simple task: revising a memoir, making a few corrections before it reaches its readers. Yet revising a text also means revisiting what made it possible. A mistaken fact leads to a memory, the memory to a relationship, the relationship to a decision, and, little by little, the revision of a memoir becomes the revision of an entire life. From this premise, Reyes-Ruiz shifts recurring concerns in his work toward a particularly intimate question: what happens when the stories we tell about ourselves cease to coincide with what we believe we remember? Identity thus emerges not only as a product of displacement and the passage of time, but also of the narratives through which we attempt to give coherence to the past.
Tomás, a Colombian historian of Japan living in New York, is preparing to publish a memoir of his personal and professional life when a DNA test casts doubt on the family history he has taken for granted for decades. The discovery also threatens to expose an old deception. Years earlier, under difficult economic circumstances, Tomás had used someone else’s Portuguese genealogy to obtain a scholarship that allowed him to continue his graduate studies in Australia. That story, taken from the family of Mónica, his partner at the time, was later incorporated into an autobiographical novel which, for reasons connected to his academic career in Japan, was transformed into a memoir. An unexpected editorial circumstance now gives him the opportunity to revise the book before publication. What initially appears to be a simple genealogical correction soon becomes something far more complicated. As Tomás edits the manuscript and begins to make those corrections, he must return to the decisions, relationships, and silences through which he has constructed his life. In this process, Reyes-Ruiz turns the revision of a text into the revision of an identity.
One of the greatest strengths of Las correcciones lies precisely in the way it presents memory as an incomplete and unstable archive. Tomás does not retrieve the past in an orderly fashion. Instead, he reconstructs it through Wendy’s diaries, photographs of an old apartment, emails, genealogical documents, DNA tests, other people’s memories, and even literary and cinematic works. Each new fragment seems to clarify something while simultaneously altering the meaning of what he thought he already knew.
His relationship with Mónica provides one of the clearest examples. For years, Tomás had described their separation as the rational decision of two people whose careers had taken them in different directions. Wendy, who knew the couple during those years in Sydney, forces him to recognize that this version, too, is a construction. By returning to forgotten conversations and scenes he had minimized, Tomás discovers that writing about the past does not simply mean preserving it. It also means selecting, arranging, interpreting, and, at times, erasing.
The novel further complicates the relationship between memory and truth by blurring the boundaries between history and fiction—a particularly resonant tension for Tomás, whose career has been devoted to writing history. His book begins as an autobiographical novel and is subsequently transformed into a memoir because, within the academic world, an experience presented as true acquires a value and legitimacy that fiction apparently does not possess. Yet that distinction becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. The genealogy Tomás invents derives from a real family history; his subsequent research reveals unexpected connections between that genealogy and his own family; and Peter’s novel, written by one of his old friends, preserves fictionalized versions of episodes that Tomás himself can no longer remember clearly. Fiction, then, does not appear solely as something that distorts reality. At times, it also preserves what memory loses. In the same way, documents and archives do not necessarily produce a definitive truth. Each fragment opens another question, and each answer forces a reinterpretation of what came before.
This instability also manifests itself in the novel’s transnational dimension. Colombia, Indonesia, Australia, Japan, Dubai, India, and the United States form part of a trajectory in which geographic displacement also produces shifts in identity. Born Luis Tomás, he becomes Luro and later simply Tomás, dropping Luis when he obtains his Australian passport. Even his name thus becomes something he can revise as he moves from one country and identity to another. The young Colombian who travels to Australia becomes an Australian citizen, a historian of Japan, a professor in the Latin American section of the Department of Area Studies, and finally an academic in New York. None of these identities cancels out the earlier ones; they accumulate, contradict one another, and transform.
Tomás, a Colombian historian of Japan living in New York, is preparing to publish a memoir of his personal and professional life when a DNA test casts doubt on the family history he has taken for granted for decades. The discovery also threatens to expose an old deception. Years earlier, under difficult economic circumstances, Tomás had used someone else’s Portuguese genealogy to obtain a scholarship that allowed him to continue his graduate studies in Australia. That story, taken from the family of Mónica, his partner at the time, was later incorporated into an autobiographical novel which, for reasons connected to his academic career in Japan, was transformed into a memoir. An unexpected editorial circumstance now gives him the opportunity to revise the book before publication. What initially appears to be a simple genealogical correction soon becomes something far more complicated. As Tomás edits the manuscript and begins to make those corrections, he must return to the decisions, relationships, and silences through which he has constructed his life. In this process, Reyes-Ruiz turns the revision of a text into the revision of an identity.
One of the greatest strengths of Las correcciones lies precisely in the way it presents memory as an incomplete and unstable archive. Tomás does not retrieve the past in an orderly fashion. Instead, he reconstructs it through Wendy’s diaries, photographs of an old apartment, emails, genealogical documents, DNA tests, other people’s memories, and even literary and cinematic works. Each new fragment seems to clarify something while simultaneously altering the meaning of what he thought he already knew.
His relationship with Mónica provides one of the clearest examples. For years, Tomás had described their separation as the rational decision of two people whose careers had taken them in different directions. Wendy, who knew the couple during those years in Sydney, forces him to recognize that this version, too, is a construction. By returning to forgotten conversations and scenes he had minimized, Tomás discovers that writing about the past does not simply mean preserving it. It also means selecting, arranging, interpreting, and, at times, erasing.
The novel further complicates the relationship between memory and truth by blurring the boundaries between history and fiction—a particularly resonant tension for Tomás, whose career has been devoted to writing history. His book begins as an autobiographical novel and is subsequently transformed into a memoir because, within the academic world, an experience presented as true acquires a value and legitimacy that fiction apparently does not possess. Yet that distinction becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. The genealogy Tomás invents derives from a real family history; his subsequent research reveals unexpected connections between that genealogy and his own family; and Peter’s novel, written by one of his old friends, preserves fictionalized versions of episodes that Tomás himself can no longer remember clearly. Fiction, then, does not appear solely as something that distorts reality. At times, it also preserves what memory loses. In the same way, documents and archives do not necessarily produce a definitive truth. Each fragment opens another question, and each answer forces a reinterpretation of what came before.
This instability also manifests itself in the novel’s transnational dimension. Colombia, Indonesia, Australia, Japan, Dubai, India, and the United States form part of a trajectory in which geographic displacement also produces shifts in identity. Born Luis Tomás, he becomes Luro and later simply Tomás, dropping Luis when he obtains his Australian passport. Even his name thus becomes something he can revise as he moves from one country and identity to another. The young Colombian who travels to Australia becomes an Australian citizen, a historian of Japan, a professor in the Latin American section of the Department of Area Studies, and finally an academic in New York. None of these identities cancels out the earlier ones; they accumulate, contradict one another, and transform.
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Paradoxically, as Tomás constructs a life increasingly difficult to reduce to a single identity, the institutions around him continue to insist on categorizing him. In Japan, his training and publications on Japanese history do not prevent some colleagues from questioning his ability to understand that history fully simply because he is not Japanese. His move into Latin American studies thus appears as a supposedly more appropriate placement for someone of his background. Reyes-Ruiz thereby contrasts a life shaped by mobility with institutions that continue to seek to fix identity within recognizable national and cultural boundaries.
Tomás, however, also participates in this desire to find order. His genealogical research, his memories, and his constant reconstructions of the past are attempts to give coherence to a life full of divergences and turning points. Throughout the novel, the possibilities of other lives repeatedly emerge: what would have happened if he had not lied about his genealogy, if Mónica had not left, if Wendy had been his partner, or if he had never left Japan. The life he has lived constantly coexists with the lives that might have been. For this reason, Las correcciones never becomes merely a story of confession or redemption. Knowing more does not necessarily make Tomás more transparent. Even as he uncovers old silences, he continues to create new ones. Revisiting his past does not eliminate the contradictions of his life; it merely makes them more visible. Toward the end of the novel, this uncertainty takes on one final dimension when another memoir appears, written by a newly discovered relative. Suddenly, Tomás no longer has complete control over the narrative of his own family history. There is another memory, another author, and another version of the past capable of complementing, altering, or contradicting his own. In Las correcciones, Reyes-Ruiz interweaves memory, archives, fiction, migration, and intimate relationships to show that identity never remains completely fixed. The corrections evoked by the title ultimately extend far beyond Tomás’s manuscript: they reach his genealogies, his relationships, and the different versions of himself that he has accumulated over the course of a transnational life. To revise, in this sense, does not mean finally arriving at a true and definitive version, but returning to the past and looking at it again. The corrections are not an end point but an ongoing process. |
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Rafael Reyes-Ruiz holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from The New School for Social Research (New York). He has taught Social Sciences and Humanities at Oberlin College (Ohio) and Zayed University (Dubai). He writes in both Spanish and English.
Las correcciones/The Corrections is his sixth novel. He has also co-edited two short-story anthologies: one devoted to Latin Americans in Japan and another to Spanish speakers in the Persian Gulf; each includes one of his own stories.
Las correcciones/The Corrections is his sixth novel. He has also co-edited two short-story anthologies: one devoted to Latin Americans in Japan and another to Spanish speakers in the Persian Gulf; each includes one of his own stories.
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