What makes Colombia remind me of Ireland? It’s not only the soft rain that falls from grey skies on the emerald uplands around Bogotá. In both countries, ingrained habits of courtesy and charm can smooth over the jagged rifts left by a history of strife.
Raised in Bogotá, and living there again after a decade in Barcelona, Juan Gabriel Vásquez writes novels in which elegant mazes of legend and rumour lead, step by graceful step, into the guilty secrets of ‘this country sick with hatred’. Perhaps only an accident of genius enthroned Gabriel García Márquez, with his hyperbolic Caribbean imagination, as the carnival king of his nation’s fiction. With Vásquez, in contrast, characters throw up a veiling mist of polite refinement and witty euphemism, of hearsay, anecdote and speculation. It often cloaks what his latest narrator calls ‘the cesspool of Colombian history’.
Most popular
David Butterfield
Most-read 2024: Decline and fall – how university education became infantilised
As in his previous novels, such as The Informers and The Sound of Things Falling, The Shape of the Ruins cunningly lures us into the labyrinth where skulk the ‘monsters of violence’ that have tormented Colombia.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in