Juan Gabriel Vásquez is a cold-case novelist, a writer whose characters — though not detectives — investigate the long lost and almost forgotten. In The Sound of Things Falling, the 2013 novel with which the Colombian Vásquez broke through to a large and appreciative North American audience, a law professor looks into the life of his murdered billiards partner, an inquiry that leads back to the death of the man's wife years earlier and to the violence of drug cartels in the 1980s. In Reputations, the protagonist thinks of Colombia as an "amnesiac country obsessed with the present," a "narcissistic country where not even the dead are capable of burying their dead. Forgetfulness was the only democratic thing in Colombia: it covered them all, the good and the bad, the murderers and heroes." Vásquez doesn't forget. The narrator of his first novel, The Informers, attempts to understand why his father contributed to the detention of immigrants in Colombia during World War II. Vásquez's second novel, The Secret History of Costaguana, goes further back in history to imagine the protagonist's relation to Joseph Conrad, his Nostromo, and the creation of the Panama Canal.Reputations is shorter and tighter. It takes place in two settings over three days and resembles a closet drama, a play about closeting the past. The protagonist, the sixty-five-year-old newspaper caricaturist Javier Mallarino, is being officially celebrated in Bogotá as a national hero for his forty years of fearless political cartoons. The next day, a young woman named Samanta comes up to his mountain home, ostensibly to interview Mallarino for a blog — in fact, she wants access to his house. At the celebration she recognized slide-show images of the interior and remembered that she had been there once twenty-eight years before to play with Mallarino's daughter, Beatriz.Reputations is not its quickly concatenating plot but the questions about the motives for and the effects of events. Looking back at three days and twenty- eight years, Mallarino and readers have to consider if his prideful certitude about the accuracy of his physical intuitions and about the gadfly effects of his art may have fractured three families: his own, because his wife and he split years before over the threat of reprisals from the powers he mocked; the family of the politician, who left behind two young sons; and Samanta's family, abandoned by her father when she was fifteen, perhaps because of that evening at Mallarino's house. Though his caricatures serve the public by speaking presumed truth to power in dangerous times, we discover that Mallarino enjoys his subjects' "humiliation," a much-repeated word rhyming with the title. Whether or not he achieves a saving humility at the end readers will decide.The Sound of Things Falling, who ultimately recognizes his obsession with the past has endangered relations with his wife and daughter. Reputations extends the danger of remembering, for Samanta, Mallarino, the newspaper for which he works, and the public that believes in him as the national conscience may all be affected if a disturbing secret is exposed.Reputations is a self- examination, Vásquez's second — or fourth — thought about his cold case orientation and earlier narrative methods. Mallarino wonders if his amusing caricatures have served only to defuse political discontent. Maybe Vásquez wonders if his entertaining stories could have more efficaciously attacked the Colombian "forgetfulness" Mallarino diagnoses. At sixty-five, Mallarino has difficulty imagining his future. At forty-three and recently returned from many years in Europe to live in Colombia, Vásquez may be imagining in Reputations his possible future as an artist, creating a self-cautioning tale about the temptation of artistic and cultural pride. Most probable, though, is that Reputations intends to comment on tendentiously political artists, novelists, and others who are, like Mallarino, cocksure about their representations of and interventions in public life. Vásquez's plural title refers to his protagonist's repute, to the reputations of others whom he may have sullied, and possibly to artists who achieve their reputations through ideological affinities in the politicized literary landscapes of Latin America.Reputations, and I think it an unhappy choice. Vásquez has a remarkable lightness of touch given his subjects. Though briskly paced, Reputations is sometimes heavy with the kind of ponderousness that omniscience seems to encourage, as in the following passage about couples:
They too were worn down by the diverse strategies that life has to wear lovers down, too many trips or too much togetherness, the accumulated weight of lies or stupidity or lack of tact or mistakes, the things said at the wrong time, with immoderate or inappropriate words, or those that, the appropriate words not having been found, were never said; or worn down too by a bad memory, yes, by the inability to remember what's essential and live within it (to remember what once made the other happy: How many lovers had succumbed to that negligent forgetting?), and by the inability, as well, to get ahead of all that wearing down and deterioration, to get ahead of the lies, the stupidity, the lack of tact, the mistakes, the things that shouldn't be said, and the silences that should be avoided . . . Because the passage doesn't really sound like Mallarino, its repetitiveness leaves the impression that Vásquez is trying to add weight, as well as length, with generalizations about situations that have been only minimally dramatized in the novel. While Vásquez's other three novels seem to have been selected from a large stock of materials outside the works' frames, Reputations appears to have been expanded from limited material to novel length. Mallarino paraphrases Michelangelo when the caricaturist thinks about "trying to extract the sculpture from the stone." It's difficult to imagine what Vásquez may have chipped away from Reputations .Reputations "was written in the spirit of the short novels I love, those concentrated studies of one character in his predicament." Although he doesn't specify those novels, in interviews he often mentions American writers — such as DeLillo and Roth — as influences, and has said Reputations seems to him more like an American novel than his other books. The context here remains political, but the past to be investigated is highly personal and, as Vásquez has said, "intimate." Both DeLillo and Roth have written short novels about old male writers reconsidering their personal failures — Point Omega and Exit Ghost — but Reputations is closest in its outlines to a novel that Vásquez has specifically referred to: Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, in which an elderly, isolated, and proud commentator on contemporary politics and sexuality learns humility at the end of the novel.Reputations . I can say that for those who don't know his earlier work, this new novel may be a good place to begin, a Vásquez primer in cold-case forensics and unsolved mysteries, an introduction with American echoes. Reputations also shouldn't diminish his faithful readers' respect, for Vásquez is an artist who experiments with the form, narration, and tone of his work — unlike the artist he puts at the center of his novel. For those familiar with his fiction, Reputations is a provocative coda to what's come so far, a work that again solicits reexamination of the past — this time Vásquez's own.Tom LeClair is the author of five novels, two critical books, and hundreds of essays and reviews in nationally circulated periodicals. He can be reached at thomas.leclair@uc.edu. Reviewer: Tom LeClair
The Barnes & Noble Review
The novel's brilliance is that we, wanting to know what happened to that sleeping girl, become Mallarino's accomplices; the novel's genius is that we, greedy for certainty, become Mallarino's prey. Like Samanta we are left with something unforgettable. In our case, it's the chill and the pleasure in recognizing the impossibility and the inevitability of living with undefined memory…Reputations can be read and enjoyed on many levels: for its reflections on art, memory and fate; for its account of recent Colombian history at a slant, which is Vásquez's trademark approach; for its Jungian exploration of lives intersecting…Anne McLean's translation is elegant. Reading a text not in its original language, one still shivers when encountering sentences written and rendered with precision and beauty.
The New York Times Book Review - Yiyun Li
07/04/2016
"[A]n account of an old cartoonist eyeing his past and the shifting forms of perception, memory and truth. Brilliant." —Financial Times
"[S]pare but powerful.... A brisk and sophisticated study of a conscience in crisis." —Kirkus (STARRED)
“Vásquez's prose is luminous, the spooling and unspooling of his characters’ thoughts convincing and powerful.” —Publishers Weekly
"Vásquez, who likely came to your attention with 2010’s scathing The Informers and certainly made your reading list with The Sound of Things Falling , the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner, returns with a reverberant new work about a life suddenly challenged... [The] response has been ecstatic." —Library Journal
Praise for Juan Gabriel Vásquez
"The narrative escalates, the mystery deepens, and the scope of the story widens with each page. This terrific novel draws on Colombia's tragic history and cycles of violence to tell the story of a troubled man trying to come to grips with the distant forces and events that have shaped his life."
"A fine and frightening study of how the past preys upon the present..."
"I felt myself under the spell of a masterful writer. Juan Gabriel Vásquez has many gifts--intelligence, wit, energy, a deep vein of feeling--but he uses them so naturally that soon enough one forgets one's amazement at his talents, and then the strange, beautiful sorcery of his tale takes hold."
"Juan Gabriel Vásquez is one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature."
"For anyone who has read the entire works of Gabriel García Márquez and is in search of a new Colombian novelist... a thrilling new discovery."
Praise for The Sound of Things Falling The Sound of Things Falling may be a page turner, but it's also a deep meditation on fate and death." —Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review
"Deeply affecting and closely observed." —Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times
"Like Bolaño, [Vásquez] is a master stylist and a virtuoso of patient pacing and intricate structure, and he uses the novel for much the same purpose that Bolaño did: to map the deep, cascading damage done to our world by greed and violence and to concede that even love can’t repair it." —Lev Grossman, Time Magazine
"Juan Gabriel Vasquez is a considerable writer. The Sound of Things Falling is an artful, ruminative mystery... And the reader comes away haunted by its strong playing out of an irreversible fate." —E. L. Doctorow
"Razor-sharp" —O, the Oprah Magazine The Wall Street Journal
“Vásquez creates characters whose memories resonate powerfully across an ingeniously interlocking structure…Vásquez creates a compelling literary work—one where an engaging narrative envelops poignant memories of a fraught historical period.” —The New Republic
“The Sound of Things Falling is a masterful chronicle of how the violence between the cartels and government forces spilled out to affect and corrode ordinary lives. It is also Vásquez's finest work to date…. His stark realism — the flip side of the magical variation of his compatriot Gabriel Garcia Marquez — together with his lyrical treatment of memory produces both an electrifying and a sobering read.” —Malcolm Forbes , San Francisco Chronicle
“Haunting… Vásquez brilliantly and sensitively illuminates the intimate effects and whispers of life under siege, and the moral ambiguities that inform survival.” –Cleveland Plain Dealer
★ 08/01/2016
★ 2016-07-03
Capturing a cast of characters in Colombia, narrator Robert Fass brings a quiet subtlety to this story of a man facing crisis at the end of his career. This short novel considers the life of Javier Mallinaro, a revered political cartoonist who is about to receive public recognition for his life’s work. However, this affirmation of his career is dampened when he discovers that having depicted a public figure in his work years ago may have led to tragic consequences. Javier, a principled man, must consider the ramifications of this possibility at this late stage of his life and career. Listeners will appreciate Fass’s erudite yet powerful performance. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
Capturing a cast of characters in Colombia, narrator Robert Fass brings a quiet subtlety to this story of a man facing crisis at the end of his career. This short novel considers the life of Javier Mallinaro, a revered political cartoonist who is about to receive public recognition for his life’s work. However, this affirmation of his career is dampened when he discovers that having depicted a public figure in his work years ago may have led to tragic consequences. Javier, a principled man, must consider the ramifications of this possibility at this late stage of his life and career. Listeners will appreciate Fass’s erudite yet powerful performance. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
