A life in writing: Juan Gabriel Vsquez

'I aim to show how the drug trade affects somebody not involved in it, somebody who like me has never seen a gramme of coke in his life'

There is a museum in downtown Bogot, Colombia's drizzly capital set high in the Andes, where a lawyer's pinstripe suit stands on display in a glass case pristine, but for two bullet holes in the back. It belonged to Jorge Elicer Gaitn, a liberal presidential candidate whose assassination in April 1948 sparked the Bogotzo, riots that set the city on fire. The riots ushered in 10 years of blood-letting between liberal and conservative sympathisers and, as peasants formed guerrilla movements, spawned the ensuing decades of South America's longest-running civil war.

For Juan Gabriel Vsquez, among the most inventive and erudite of Colombia's emerging generation of novelists, the assassination was the "defining episode of our history our own JFK". Those gun shots were "our coming of age when Colombia was welcomed into the cold war. And we still haven't got to the bottom of it; nobody knows who killed Gaitn."

Novelists leapt into the breach, "while the bodies were still falling" in the 1940s and 50s. But Colombia's most famous writer, Gabriel Garca Mrquez in the capital during the riots dismissed them as a crude "inventory of dead people", crafted without art. "He complained writers hadn't taken the time to learn how to write novels," Vsquez says. "It's not enough to have the material; you have to have the narrative strategy, or you fail."

Vsquez, aged 37, has taken that lesson to heart. His talk bristles with quotations from writers he has ingested, rather as, in his words, the Nobel laureate from Aracataca "hired and fired" Faulkner and Hemingway. Good writers, Vsquez believes, "control their own influences it's not involuntary". Hailing from an urban landscape of skyscrapers and mountain mist, he found the ruses that conjured the sweltering Caribbean plantations of Macondo were no use to him. He chose mentors in Joyce, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow. Joseph Conrad was key, particularly "his obsessive idea that novels go into dark places and come back with the news. It's not necessarily geographical," he says, "but shedding light on dark places of the soul."

The Informers (2004), published in a translation by Anne McLean in 2008, nods to Conrad's Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent. A morally complex thriller set in the late 80s and 90s in Colombia, it

looks back to the 40s and the second world war, when the government unjustly interned German nationals on the basis of murky blacklists and spying, during a period of zealous realignment with Washington. One character plagiarises Gaitn's speeches, while, for a Jewish refugee, the Bogotzo riots are a terrifying echo of Kristallnacht. Vsquez's interest is in exploring "dark corners of Colombian history that have made us what we are now."

The novel was published in 12 languages; Carlos Fuentes admired its charting of that "grey area of human actions and awareness where our capacity to make mistakes, betray and conceal, creates a chain reaction that condemns us to a world without satisfaction". Vsquez was named one of the Bogot 39 Latin America's top writers under 40 when the city was Unesco world book capital in 2007. For Mario Vargas Llosa, his is "one of the most original new voices" of the region.

Vsquez's father's uncle was ambassador to London in the 50s, and his father's three-year stay as a teenager ("very important in his sentimental education") partly explains his son's "incurable Anglophilia". As a trilingual translator, Vsquez has rendered works by EM Forster and John Dos Pasos, as well as Victor Hugo, into Spanish. He lives in Barcelona with his wife, Mariana, a publishers' publicist, and their four-year-old twins, Martina and Carlota. Since the couple left Colombia for Europe 14 years ago, the country has become "my subject my only obsession". But he could tackle it only after it struck him that the novel "can start from a point of not knowing; it can be an act of understanding, investigation, inquisition."

The Secret History of Costaguana (2007), published this month by Bloomsbury in McLean's translation, is a humorous, picaresque novel of adventure and a knowing take on a family saga. Set in 19th- and early 20th-century Colombia and London, it probes the political intrigue that mired the building of the Panama canal, complete with financial crash and US intervention. But it is posed as a bitter, playful riposte to Conrad's Nostromo; the British writer appears as a character. Conrad's fictitious province of Sulaco broke away from a South American republic named Costaguana, over a silver mine. As Conrad was writing the novel in London in 1903, Colombia's province of Panama seceded in a revolution spurred by machinations over the canal. "Two of my obsessions came together a dark moment in Colombian history, and my literary god, who had written about my country, transforming and distorting it."

There is "no concrete proof that Conrad even set foot in Colombia", he says. Yet for Vsquez, author of a short biography of Conrad in Spanish, The Man from Nowhere, Nostromo is by far the "best book about Latin America written outside the Spanish language. Conrad realised the place wasn't to be narrated from a psychological realist point of view. It has an exaggerated quality." Vsquez's novel reflects his obsession with the writing of history. "History is a tale somebody has told us from a biased point of

view; it's only one possibility among many." Novels "give another version, recover truths that have been repressed". The task is to "make Latin America's past come alive so we can gain some control over our future."

The novel was born in September 2005 at the same time as his daughters, who were premature, at sixand-a-half months. He would take his laptop to hospital and "write through the night, while my wife fed them, with all the instruments around". The experience coloured the book. "There's no way having children doesn't change your writing," Vsquez says. "You become more aware of language when you see it coming to life in a child."

Vsquez was born in 1973, and had a "wild, rural upbringing" on the northern outskirts of Bogot. His father was a lawyer (as is his younger sister), who expected him to join his law firm, though "he couldn't complain he'd force-fed me novels". During the World Cup in Spain when he was nine, and "football was my life", his father paid him to translate a biography of Pel into Spanish: "It nourished my relationship with books and the English language." He went to Bogot's Anglo-Colombian school, then did a law degree at Bogot university, but was already set on a literary career.

It struck him recently that he grew up in tandem with the drug wars. "I was born as the drug business started with American 'businessmen' who found Colombian cocaine could generate incredible revenues." Increasingly harsh US laws "built the drug business". His adolescence coincided with the most violent period of the 80s and early 90s, when rival cocaine cartels fought the state with terrorism. "Politicians were murdered; bombs went off in Bogot all the time, aimed at district attorneys and the intelligentsia. You were afraid violence could touch you at any point. It was amazing how easily you get used to that how normal a life you can lead." He left for Europe as the most overt urban violence was ending, after the Medelln cartel boss Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993."The relationship my country has with the drug trade has shaped my life," he says. "The consequences reach into every corner of society."

Convinced that the "only way out of Colombia's conflict is the legalisation of drugs", he says: "They're the main source of funding for leftwing guerrillas and rightwing paramilitaries. Both the military power of every illegal armed group, and the power of corruption, would disappear." Yet he holds out little hope. "There would have to be an international accord with the greatest consumer the US whose puritanical society will never allow it. Until it does, the producer countries will be drowned in these wars forever."

He left not only to escape a violent city, but to write, living in France and Belgium and, when he married in 1999, moving to Spain. Studying Latin American literature at the Sorbonne, he wrote two novels that he more or less disowns. In Paris he was mistakenly diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. "For a long moment a few days I thought I only had a short time to live." He had treatable TB, but the shock of the original diagnosis lives on. "A minor character in my novels always gets it."

Barcelona was the engine of the 60s boom, when books by Latin Americans were published in Spain and exported, making them accessible for the first time outside their own countries. Vsquez reveres the late Catalan publisher Carlos Barral as "the first to recognise what young Latin Americans were doing". Yet he tilts at an assumption that literary influence is territorial. The boom remade the literary landscape, he says, by bucking a "provincial view that it should be written within a Spanish tradition, as national, committed literature. Garca Mrquez's generation felt free to look elsewhere. It was almost heresy, and incredibly liberating." But Vsquez has said that expectations abroad "castrated" later novelists. A generation "paid the price of not being cheap imitators; they didn't get the audience they deserved". His own, he feels, has greater freedom.

The untranslated short stories of Los Amantes de Todos Los Santos (2001) were set in France and the Belgian Ardennes. The Informers, his first fiction set in his homeland, was sparked by a conversation with a German-Jewish woman, a refugee to Colombia in 1938, whose father narrowly escaped internment as an enemy alien. It reveals how history penetrates private lives, and how the past devours the present. The novel presaged a national conversation about demobilisation during Colombia's peace process, and a controversial amnesty for paramilitaries. For Vsquez, it is about the "past as personal baggage we carry as individuals; and the tension between memory and voluntary forgetting; between thinking about the past and suppressing it to move on".

Costaguana identifies the origins of the split between liberals and conservatives in a 19th-century battle between anticlericals and obscurantists, at a time of a thriving free press and a democratic constitution. "If historical novels don't comment on the present, I don't see the point," Vsquez says. They can "remind us of roads not taken how things could have been better. Colombia's 1863 constitution was admired by Victor Hugo. The forces of progress were strong. Why did that go wrong?" He personally views the Catholic church as "one of the most damaging institutions in Latin America a force of evil", alluding to inflammatory speeches by priests during the riots: "'Your church allows you to kill liberals because they're the devil incarnate' was said from pulpits." To this day, "it obstructs women's and homosexual rights, as well as a secular state and education."

Both novels reflect US power in Latin America. For Vsquez, that created a "personal conflict: my novels use everything I've learned from American literature to question a dark side of American politics". Yet he dislikes finger-pointing at "American imperialists". In Costaguana, liberal politicians conspire to grant the US control over the canal zone, when conservatives obstruct the treaty. "Nobody stole Panama from us Panamanians felt central government wanted a bigger slice," he says. "Colombian politicians were as responsible as opportunistic Americans. The elite was myopic, self-centred and snobbish."

Since 2007 he has written a weekly column for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, and finds political debate "addictive: a novel is about asking questions, but as a columnist you love certainty". He visits the country every year, partly wanting his daughters to "know where they come from, because I have no intention of going back to live. I like being a foreigner; I love the impunity, and looking at your place from a distance."

He had hoped for change in this month's presidential election, and is scathing about the outgoing twoterm conservative Alvaro Uribe, whose "democratic security" crackdown is credited with making at least cities safer. So much so, that the country is being rebranded for tourism. "In the process, he's destroyed Colombian democracy," Vsquez says, despite the largely peaceful poll. "Civilians have been spied upon, or killed and passed off as dead guerrillas. The separation of church and state has almost been obliterated; congressional votes exchanged for political favours. The question is, was that price worth it?"

His hopes were dashed by last Sunday's runoff, when Uribe's former defence minister, Juan Manuel Santos, beat the Green candidate and former mayor of Bogot, Antanas Mockus. Vasquez sees the election as really a referendum on defeating the Farc (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas. Mockus "did an incredible job as mayor. When I left, Bogot was a very violent, stressful city to live in. People had forgotten how to resolve conflicts peacefully; he taught them to live together again."

Those Colombian readers who congratulate Vsquez on avoiding the topic that most soils their image ("I smile and say, 'thank you'") may be in for a shock. His next novel will be a "private history of drugs". "Narco-realists" such as Fernando Vallejo, whose Our Lady of the Assassins depicted a teenage sicario an assassin for a cartel have tackled the trade head-on. But Vsquez wants a larger canvas, and to "rescue the narrative of the drug wars from cheap melodrama and simplistic Hollywood movies". His ambition will be to show "how the drug trade affects somebody not involved in it; somebody who like me has never seen a gramme of coke in his life."

NEXT JOB The Story Is to Blame: PW Talks with Juan Gabriel Vasquez

The Sound of Things Falling explores the ways in which stories shape lives. It begins in Vasquezs native Colombia in the volatile, drug-fueled 1990s, when a brief friendship results in violence that profoundly alters the protagonists life.

Youve said that your works were about the past as personal baggage we carry... and the tension between memory and voluntary forgetting. But in this novel, it is someone elses past that devours your heros present.

Well, Ive always been interested in that particular area of human experience: the place where private lives meet public events, or rather crash into them. That thing we call historyhow does it work upon us when it is not yet history, when it is still going on? Also, how does it change with time? What is this mysterious thing, the past? How is it possible that it changes, instead of remaining the same forever, constantly forcing us to reevaluate our own lives? All these questions guide my way through [writing] novels, and certainly through The Sound of Things Falling. Of course, they are molded by my own past and that of my country, because thats where I find surprising events. I think I write about my country because its the one place I thought I understood, only to realize that it is full of dark corners and silenced truths.

You are a trilingual translator, but someone else translates your books. Does it seem strange to read your own work in translation? Do you edit it for nuance?

It doesnt seem strange, no. On the contrary, what I find fascinating about Anne McLeans wonderful translations is how familiar they seem to me. My books are all very different from each other (each one being a small rebellion against the previous one), so Anne has to come up with different voices every time, which must be infuriating. But we do work a lot together, sometimes rewriting sentences for euphony, sometimes eliminating whole paragraphs that, for some reason, dont come across well in English. Its a privilege, but also a curse; the temptation to rewrite it all is terribly bothersome.

Are you consistently aware of the Latin-American fiction tradition when writing?

Well, ours is a young novelistic tradition, so until very recently we were still discovering how LatinAmerican subjects sounded on the page. What did we want to do with fiction? What kind of language did we have at our disposal? In the middle of that search, we were mesmerized by the invention of magical realismthis particular lens through which to look at our world. But that lens was overused; it became cloudy quite suddenly. Fortunately, other great writers, from Borges to Vargas Llosa, had come up with different methods to explore the Latin-American soul. I would like to belong to their tradition.

Coming of Age in a Drug War

As a student in his early 20s, Juan Gabriel Vsquez stumbled across a man crying in public while listening to a recording on tape. Nearly two decades later, the image came back to him and sparked his third novela dark mystery, steeped in the history of the Colombian drug trade.

"The Sound of Things Falling," released Thursday in the U.S. by Riverhead Books, plays out against the history of Bogot, Colombia's capital, and its drug-related violence in the last decades of the 20th century. It is the author's third novel to be published in English.

A rising star in literary circles abroad, Mr. Vsquez's work is gaining traction in the U.S. following the publication of his last two novels in English, "The Informers" in 2009, and "The Secret History of Costaguana" in 2011.

Despite living outside Colombia for much of his adult lifehe lived in Europe, mostly Barcelona, for 16 yearsmost of Mr. Vsquez's novels are set in downtown Bogot, in places that he used to frequent as a studenta billiards club, a cafe, a particular street corner. "I grew quite obsessive about reproducing that neighborhood," he said.

Writing from Barcelona, he would have his friends in Bogot describe in detail what they could see from a particular location he wanted to include in the novel. When Anne McLean, who translated the book into English, flew to Colombia to visit while he was there, he took her through the city, pointing out the sites where scenes in the novel take placeincluding a street corner where a character is shot (Mr. Vsquez says he witnessed a similar scene take place in real life).

Mr. Vsquez, 40 years old, spent his childhood just outside the capital city. "My generation was born at the same time as the drug trade," he said, "And I began wondering about the implications of that." The novel features a narrator roughly his age, someone "who lives through these years of violence in much the same way as I didgetting used to fear, getting used to the possibility of the bombing."

In the fall of last year, Mr. Vsquez moved back to Bogot with his family. Lately, he has been able to observe the city firsthand once againwhich he does, frequently, as he begins work on a new novel.

"You thought the place had no secrets for you," he said. "Suddenly it's full of secrets."

No More Magical Realism: Juan Gabriel Vsquez and the New Latin American Lit

There was a time not so long ago when Latin American literature, as it appeared on college syllabi, in critical discourse, and in writers' own spheres of influence, summoned up the whimsical and fantastical.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who famously aimed to set about "destroying the line of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic," may not have invented magical realism, but he introduced it to the English-speaking world with a 1967 masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Captivating readers of three dozen languages with tales of the utopic banana town Macondo, Marquez borrowed liberally from the musings of Jorge Luis Borges and pioneers Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Asturias. He set in motion a "Latin American Boom" that flourished well into the 1970s. He cast a surrealist influence on everyone from Salman Rushdie to Toni Morrison, whose novel Beloved bore the echoes of Marquez's haunted relationship with ghosts and memories.

But some time after Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo, el supremo in 1974, the Boom generation simmered, its experimental tendencies faded, and readers wondered whether magical realism could adequately address a new generation of political strife and social realities.

"Even the genre's staunchest defenders agree that it has lost its magic," Newsweek proclaimed in 2002, by which point the surviving pioneers of the style had begun to distance themselves. "It's become kitschy, a commodity," the scholar Ilan Stavans told the magazine.

Constrained by the fruits of its literary currency, critics wondered: what next? Newsweek pointed to a 1996 short story collection called "McOndo," which became a movement of its own. Others, to the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolao, whose acclaimed, posthumous epic 2666 delves deep into a series of unsolved Mexican homicides and landed an international audience that had eluded most of his contemporaries.

The latest is a slew of Latin American neo-realists, writers who've fled Marquez's mystical landscapes and, like Bolao, landed in the hard-boiled, decidedly unmagical realm of the crime novel. Jorge Volpi, writing recently for The Nation, identified a new crop of writers in Mexico and Colombia confronting drug violence by "giv[ing] a literary patina to the language of the narcos" and, in so doing, pioneering what Volpi has termed the narconovelas:

During the last ten years, narconovelas have flooded the bookstores, sparking interest among Mexican readers and foreign critics in a new strain of Latin American exoticism and displacing magic realism as the regions characteristic genre. In these books, Mexico is portrayed as a violent, uncontrollable and fantastic world in contrast to the West, which consumes drugs without suffering or being scarred by the violence of the trade.

Volpi points to a long and varied list of writersSergio Gonzlez Rodrguez, Mario Gonzlez Surez, Heriberto Ypez, and otherswho've dared to question whether Latin America has much magic to offer.

And then there is the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vsquez, whose astounding new novel based on the Colombian drug wars, The Sound of Things Falling, has landed him as arguably the finest of this new crop of Latin American writers.

The reception for the book, which was released this month, began as a steady murmur. It has risen to a chorus of praise that eclipses Vsquez's previous works, The Informers and The Secret History of Costaguana. According to Jynne Martin, a publicity director for Riverhead, The Sound of Things Falling is already in its third printing and has become an extended New York Times bestseller. Critics, meanwhile, have been heaping praise on the book. Some, noting the narrative's bracing realism, wonder if Vsquez has set a new tone for Latin-American literature, one that leaves magical realism and its cultural trappings neatly behind.

"In Vsquez, the writing is really nitty-gritty realism. There's nothing fantastical," Edmund White, whose raving New York Times review observes that the novelist "is nothing like Gabriel Garca Mrquez," told The Atlantic Wire. "Vsquez is very caught up in his national history. He's not interested in having a kind of Disney version of it." White compared the novel to the work of the late Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti.

In a review for NPR, Marcela Valdes called it "the most engrossing Latin American novel I've read since Roberto Bolao's 2666." In a phone conversation, she compared Vsquez's treatment of the drug tradewhich he approaches indirectly, from a starkly emotional perspectiveto Bolao's depiction of serial homicides in Mexico. "It's no Breaking Bad," she said. "It's a much more rare look at how this drug has changed society."

Meanwhile, the novel has charmed the likes of Jonathan Franzen and E. L. Doctorow. Descriptions vary, but the question remains on the lips of the literary sphere: is Vsquez the future of Latin American literature?

From Macondo to Bogot

The Sound of Things Falling isyesa crime novel. But to call it that is reductive, insufficient to capture how it approaches crime through a personal, familial, and generational lens. Like Marquez, Vsquez is obsessed with the ghosts of memory. But his ghosts aren't magical. They're psychological.

And they've haunted its author as much as his characters.

The novel begins, for instance, with a hippopotamus. It's a dead hippo, an escaped male "the color of black pearls," the same one whose posthumous photo appeared in a magazine in 2009 and threw Vsquez into the narrative that weaves his novel together.

Indeed, The Sound of Things Falling is a story about the long reach of memorywhat its narrator terms "the damaging exercise of remembering"and the material signifiers that can launch one into the past: a cassette tape, a letter, a scar. Why not a hippo?

"It was 2009 and I opened up this magazine and I found the photo of a dead hippo, with which the novel begins," Vsquez explained when reached at his home in Bogot. "That image did something very strange for me. For Colombians of my generation, one of the strongest images we have is the photograph of [billionaire drug lord] Pablo Escobar shot dead on the rooftops of Medelln. That hippo, in a very strange way, resembled Escobar."

And so it was a hippoa slain one, helpless and enormousthat drove Vsquez to investigate the long, violent legacy of the Colombia of his adolescence, the drug lords and the murders and the bombings and the political intimidation. Not a magical creature, but a real animal like the ones famously held in Escobar's zoo. Carried out by members of Colonel Hugo Martinez's Search Bloc at the end of 1993, Escobar's death signified the conclusion of that eraa grisly decade that left lasting scars on the generation that came of age during it.

"I started remembering what it was like to live with this constant fear," Vsquez said. "I started thinking about those years in a very personal way, [and] I started remembering those years as I had never remembered them before. I realized that the novel was about the emotional or moral side of something we already knew quite well in its public side."

Riverhead Books The gripping, noirish story of Antonio, a young law professor who contends with the psychological trauma of a bullet that was meant for another, the novel's plot is too rich, too carefully woven and cleverly paced, to reveal in any great depth. It's about the drug trade, but its characters aren't really users. It's about the 1970s and '80s, but it's mostly narrated in the '90s. It's consumed by the miracle of flight, but remains grimly aware of its dangers. Mostly, it questions what it means to grow up in a landscape ravaged by terrorism. Its characters trade stories about where they were at the time of different attacks, about avoiding public places and living "with the possibility that people close to us might be killed."

"If you listen to an explosion, people from my generation know if it's a bomb or if it's something else," the writer recalled. "We got used to walking around with a coin in our pockets so in case of a bombing we could go to the nearest pay phone and call home."

It's a story likely to resonate with Vsquez's readers whether or not they are from Colombia. Having left Bogot in 1996, the writer discussed working on the novel in Spain only several years after the Madrid train bombings of 2004. Then, after 17 years in Europe, he returned to Bogot, driven by the urge to live again in the country he has written obsessively aboutand the hope that his twin daughters might experience Colombian life.

"The interesting thing is how universal these emotions are," he said. "There are people who have gone through times of terrorism, whether it's the IRA in Ireland or the Shining Path in Peru or 9/11 attacks in New York. So everybody knows at this time and place in history, the Western world in the 21st century, what it's like to live with fear, with this kind of anxiety, this kind of unpredictable violence. And I think that has in a way shaped the reception of the book."

Like those before him, Vsquez has written a story of Latin America for the rest of the world to savor, but his is coated in fear and terror rather than mysticism.

Tragedy, Not Magic

"I don't think magical realism is a major reference for writers in Latin America anymore," Marcela Valdes, the NPR critic, told me. "I think people continue to use it as a frame of reference because we still haven't seen a novel in the United States that has had the same impact as Gabriel Garca Mrquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude."

But she cautioned against generalizing all Latin-American literature together. "There's just too much variety with what's going on, and the region is so enormous."

Vsquez, though, noted the spiked interest in the region's literary output. "It does feel like something is happening," he said. "After what we call the Latin American 'boom generation'involving Mrquez and Carlos Fuentes and all those people who made us discover the people who came beforeI don't think American readers have been so attentive to what's going on in Latin American literature as [they are to] what is going on today."

He admitted that his novels diverge sharply from the flourishes that have dominated the Latin-American tradition for so long. Indeed, he has publicly proclaimed this agenda, as Edmund White quotes in his review:

In my novel there is a disproportionate reality, but that which is disproportionate in it is the violence and cruelty of our history and of our politics. Let me be clear about this. . . . I can say that reading One Hundred Years of Solitude . . . in my adolescence may have contributed much to my literary calling, but I believe that magic realism is the least interesting part of this novel. I suggest reading One Hundred Years as a distorted version of Colombian history.

But his is not a conscious rebellion. It's the only way he knows how to write about his country.

"My work is a reaction to the idea of magical realism as the only way to discover Latin America," he explained to the Wire. "It's something that still many readers believe. And this is obviously something I strongly oppose. I don't feel Latin America is a magical continent. I feel Latin American history is, if anything, tragedy."

"It's the tragedy of recent Latin American history," he said, "that I'm trying to tell in my novel."

Juan Gabriel Vasquez's "The Secret History of Costaguana"

This may be thanks to Bolano and his massive appeal, but it seems (to me at least), like Spanish literature is going through a sort of a Second Boom. Not so much in terms of a shared aesthetic, but in terms of having captured the imaginations of American publishers. In addition to standards like Javier Marias and Fernando del Paso, over the past few years works from Evelio Rosero, Alejandro Zambra, Eloy Urroz, Jorge Volpi, Cesar Aira, Santiago Roncagliolo, Carlos Gamerro, Sergio Chejfec, and Enrique Vila-Matas have been published in English translation, and have received both great critical attention and a decent-sized readership.

And thats just in the fiction world . . . Additionally, there have been a number of collections of poetry published, along with Grantas Best of the Young Spanish-Language Novelists issue and the forthcoming The Future Is Not Ours anthology.

All of this is a brief (and rather vague) prelude to talking about Juan Gabriel Vasquez, the author of The Informers and the more recently publishing The Secret History of Costaguana. Ive had Secret History on my shelf for months, but havent had a chance to get to it yet. Well, after exchanging a few emails with Jeremy Osner (who runs this blog) about this book, I think its about to move up my to read pile . . .

Jeremy was blown away by this novel, in addition to writing a short review (see below), he translated (with Anne McLeans editorial guidance), a piece by Vasquez on How to Read Novels:

I keep wondering why we do it: why would an adult devote his time, his mental energies, his moral intelligence to reading about things that never happened to people who never existed; how could this activity be so important, so vital, that this person would voluntarily withdraw from real life to carry it out. Ive come across a few answers over the years, some of them in conversations with other addicted readers, but mostly in books here and there along the way. And indeed, the most recent of these books is truly marvelous: The Nave and Sentimental Novelist consists of six essays in which Orhan Pamuk seeks to answer one crucial question: What happens to us when we read (and write) novels? This book is the most illuminating, most stimulating, most abundant examination of this difficult topic that Ive read in years. I can do no less than to offer this urgent call to readers.

I have learned by experience that there are many ways to read a novel, says Pamuk. We read sometimes logically, sometimes with our eyes, sometimes with our imagination, sometimes with a small

part of our mind, sometimes the way we want to, sometimes the way the book wants us to, and sometimes with every fiber of our being. In other words: there are no two identical readers of the same novel; not even two identical readings. And this fact, which seems so obvious, is what can explain the effects, the intimate, unpredictable effects the novel can have on us. What are these effects? Pamuk says we read the way we drive a car, pressing the pedals and shifting gears while watching the signals and traffic and the landscape around us: our intellect moves in a thousand and one directions in every instant. With part of our mind we do the simplest thing: follow the story. But readers of serious novels are doing something more: are looking constantly for the secret center of the novel, for that revelation the novel seeks to bring to light, which cannot be summarized, which can only be expressed just as the novel expresses it. Sbato was once asked what he meant to say in On Heroes and Tombs. Sbato replied, If I could have said it any other way, I would never have written the book.

You can read the rest of the piece here and all of Vasquezs weekly columns here.

(I think its fitting that Im posting this today, since that bit above loosely ties into the Very Professional Podcast that were posting later today.)

Going back to the book itself, heres Jeremys summary:

The Secret History of Costaguana (2011) is Juan Gabriel Vsquezs second novel to be translated into English, following 2009s The Informers. It is a captivating book, the very best kind of historical novel: Vsquez has researched meticulously a corner of history that may be unfamiliar to many readers (as it was to me); he draws connections between that corner and the broader currents of world history and the history of literature; and he does so playfully, inquisitively, accepting none of the strands of historical narrative as immutable fact.

Vsquez chosen topic is the first attempt to build a canal in the Panamanian province of Colombia, in the 1880s. One of the people who was in that corner of the world during those years was Joseph Conrad, a key literary influence for Vsquez, who used his observations of Colombia as the basis for his novel Nostromo, set in the fictional country of Costaguana. Vsquez narrator Juan Altamirano crosses paths with Conrad in Colombia, and again many years later in London, and he sets his own South American voice up in opposition to the colonial voice of Conrad.

And so we get a beautifully-drawn picture of Colombia and Panama during a critical point in their history, and in the history of their relationship with the US; and interlaced into this picture we get the novelists statement of his influences and his literary education. (For more of the latter, be sure to read Vsquez excellent essay on literary influence, Misconceptions Surrounding Gabriel Garca Mrquez.) Vsquez powerful, enchanting prose finds an able translator in Anne McLean.

He also directed my attention to a few things about Vasquez on The Guardian, including this podcast, and this write up by Maya Jaggi.

But of all this, one of the coolest bits from Vasquez in this quote that Jeremy found in his book chat at The Guardian: I have a tendency to trust translators, mainly because nobody does it for the money.

The Sound of Things Falling

The Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia has a thesis in which he claims that every successful story contains within it another story. The first story narrates the action of the plot, while the second story is more or less hidden from view, or in parentheses. The art of the story-teller, according to Piglia, lies in knowing how to encode the secret story within the interstices of the first.

In Joseph Conrads The Secret Sharer this duality is expressed as tension between the self and its other, and the theme is one to which the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vsquez has been drawn in all three of his novels. In fact his second, The Secret History of Costaguana is in the parenthetic sense of Piglias definition about Conrad himself. There is more than a little of Conrad also about the inner weather of Vsquezs writing, not least in the elusive and at times strenuous unravelling of plot. In his new book the structure of telling is doubly replicated, both the main story and the subsidiary story recounting (among other things) the relationship of a father and his daughter, while the threads holding together the parental relationship begin to unravel.

The novel begins with an account of the shooting of a hippopotamus, a one-and-a-half ton male the colour of black pearl. The hippo has escaped from the private zoo of drugs baron Pablo Escobar, in the Magdalena Valley, south of Bogot, after the zoo, along with all of Escobars vast and ill-gotten estate, falls into ruin. The narrator, Antonio Yammara, visited Escobars zoo as a twelve-year-old, against the express orders of his parents, and the memory is still vivid. And it is memory its tenuousness and its faulty reconstruction that lies at the heart of this novel. The saddest thing that can happen to a person we are told, is to find out their memories are lies. Elsewhere we learn that remembering wears us out. Familiar tropes emerge: deception, the inescapability of the past, stories that mirror one another, and fatherhood. It is perhaps unavoidable recalling Borges famous dictum that mirrors and copulation are abominations, since they both replicate the numbers of man. Image

Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Back in the 1990s, Antonio is a young lawyer who befriends a lonely man with a secret. Ricardo Laverde has just been released after twenty years in jail. He says he makes (or made) his living as a pilot, so it is hardly a spoiler to reveal that, given Colombias history, he might on occasion have made aerial deliveries for the wrong sorts of people. We also learn that US Peace Corps workers developed the

cocaine-refining technology that helped turn Colombia into the nexus of the narco-industry over the following two decades. Ricardo was himself married to a young Peace Corps volunteer, whom he expects shortly to welcome back to Colombia after two decades separation. With some evocative, painterly, strokes Vsquez leads the reader through the landscape of Ricardos past, before returning, with a searing sense of loneliness and regret, to Antonios present.

Anne MacLean has translated all three of JGVs novels into English. There were a couple of lines I questioned: her reference to Mayas hands being tainted by the sun rings strangely in English, as does the phrase: my closed lungs made themselves felt effortlessly. But these are small matters: for the most part the work reads beautifully.

Vsquezs persistence in exploring the darker corners of his countrys history, in probing his characters intractable duality, and in questioning the frailties of both collective and individual memory, is compounded by his skill in evoking those instances, known to us all, when things changes for ever: such as when the telephone rings, and all you have to do is pick up the receiver and a new fact comes through it into the house, something weve neither sought nor requested and that sweeps us along like an avalanche.