As translator Daniel Alarcón says in his introduction, even the existence of Emma Reyes’s book is “miraculous”. She died in 2003, aged 84, in Bordeaux – an émigré from her native Colombia, little known as a painter (a singular style of densely decorative primitivism), not at all as a writer. She “rubbed shoulders with Alberto Moravia, Jean-Paul Sartre” and was “a kind of godmother to Latin American artists and writers” in France – but only two people knew she had written this book: Reyes’s friend Germán Arciniegas, a Colombian historian and journalist, and Gabriel García Márquez.
The book comprises 23 letters to Arciniegas that recall the harrowing onset of her life journey as child and pubescent. It’s described with such quirky grace and raw honesty, such a childlike eye for detail and disarming explanation of the inexplicable, that it is as poetic as it is horrific. A fatal fire caused by fireworks upon the arrival of the governor of the region of Choco into the town of Chaqueta is “the most beautiful and extraordinary spectacle of my childhood”. And on the day her baby half-brother is abandoned by their mother, “I didn’t cry, because tears wouldn’t have been enough”.
The first 18 missives, from Paris, date between 1969 and 1972, after which Arciniegas showed them to Márquez. The master responded with effusive praise, but Reyes was furious at what she saw as a breach of confidentiality and ceased to write for 20 years – the final letter, from Bordeaux, is dated 1997. The book only appears now thanks to the tenacity of a tiny publisher in Bogotá called Laguna Libros.
Subliminally, since this is childhood memoir, political – as well as human – themes drive the book. Little Emma’s memories recount, without saying so, that her mother, María, is mistress to others whose children she bears, including a politician who becomes the aforementioned governor of Choco. For this, a half-brother called Eduardo has to be taken from them for better concealment, and a second baby boy, beloved only by Emma, abandoned. A sort of Latin latter-day descendant of Zola’s Nana, mother María’s life exposes the sires’ arrogant abuse of their concubines, but she is trash to them – and the ensuing children are trash to her.
They grow up in places of squalor, seeking drama and stolen pleasures that derive from their need to love and be loved. Emma and her older half-sister, Helen, are soon abandoned, and so begins the “second act”, enclosed within a convent so tyrannical that Reyes tries to comply in her own way: loving statues of the Virgin; craving a first communion dress.
But she is “born in sin”, according to mother superior and the priest, and comes to realise her worth. She becomes “bored to death sitting through the catechism lessons” and prefers “chatting with God and Mary”.
The young Emma injects magic into the realism and vice versa – not for nothing is Reyes a compatriot of Márquez. A “new girl” arrives with a doll that becomes an occult fetish, with tales of “the world” more compelling “than stories of Sacred History”. The children sleep, and are often kept for days, locked in a windowless room. The geography and regime of the convent – also an embroidery sweatshop – are explained as a series of padlocks and barriers, reflecting its own isolation.
Aged 19, Emma connects with “the world” beyond the locks by meeting the eye of a milkman through a hole he has made in the convent wall, wherein, characteristically, she beholds laughter. Now she must regain that world whence she came, and does so by stealing the key while its keeper prays – an act of freedom both intimate and epic, like the book itself.
• The Book of Emma Reyes: A Memoir in Correspondence by Emma Reyes is published by W&N (£16.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
