William Brett

Giving the boy a bad review

William Brett reviews Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s new novel

issue 31 May 2008

William Brett reviews Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s new novel

Do we carry the sins of our fathers? This sentiment may seem archaic — reminiscent, for instance, of the revenge cycles that play out in Greek tragedy. But in the Colombia of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Informers, the notion of generational retribution is all too contemporary. In cultures riven by catastrophe and personal loss, where revenge and despair are rife, it seems natural for people to bear responsibility for their predecessors’ actions. Look at post-war Germans, who for decades (and still now, some might say) carried the shame of their Nazi past.

Colombia certainly qualifies as a country riven by catastrophe. Its post-war politics have been consistently unstable, and ‘narco-guerrillas’, powerful militants grown fat on drug money, are still waging a form of civil war with an increasingly heavy-handed state. The Informers looks at Colombia’s less familiar wartime history, in which many Colombian Germans, accused by the US (rightly or wrongly) of harbouring Nazi sympathies, were ‘blacklisted’, and as a result suffered what Vásquez calls ‘a sort of civil death’.

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