If recently we were talking about a thriving Colombian writer like he is George Franco, in the case of Juan Gabriel Vasquez We have no choice but to surrender to the consummate writer in all his excellence. Because half vocation and creative genius; Half dedication and documentation, this narrator from Bogotá has long earned the recognition of being one of the most important current writers in Spanish.
Occurred long before Juan Gabriel turned 30. Because when a budding writer (a twentysomething who tries to mark black on white), he ends up discovering himself bordering on existential arguments and always finding the most accurate images and the most efficient symbols in order to cultivate emotions in any reader , is that the thing was serious.
So until today. With that perseverance of someone who finds in the pleasure and profession of writing an extension of being, of existing, a vital justification for telling stories. The novel seems to have no secrets for a Juan Gabriel who, based on ingenuity and perseverance, already carves his masterpieces. Those frames that stand as sculptures of letters, words, sentences and universes.
Top 3 recommended novels by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
The sound of the things when they fall
It was always raised as a doubt between the existential and the deductive whether the tree that falls in a lonely forest makes noise or not. Subjectivity makes reality dependent. Or perhaps human ethnocentrism claims that noise is just a matter of anthropological perception.
Things always make noise when falling, from my point of view. In the same way that the things that happen to the protagonists of this novel should be considered as proven facts despite the fact that everyone wants to do, precisely a deaf ear.
Because that is another problem. It may be that there was a time when no one heard the noise of things falling; nor the noises of the shots that deafened the impact of the bullets in the bones.
In this novel we take off the caps and bandage and discover together with Antonio that transition towards what happened when hardly anyone wants to give an account or offer forgiveness in favor of urgent oblivion.
As soon as he meets Ricardo Laverde, young Antonio Yammara understands that in his new friend's past there is a secret, or perhaps several. His attraction to the mysterious life of Laverde, born from their encounters in a pool hall, turns into a true obsession the day he is assassinated.
Convinced that solving the enigma will show him a path at his vital crossroads, Yammara undertakes an investigation that dates back to the early XNUMXs, when a generation of idealistic young people witnessed the birth of a business that would eventually lead to Colombia - and to the world - on the edge of the abyss.
Years later, the exotic escape of a hippopotamus, the last vestige of the impossible zoo with which Pablo Escobar exhibited his power, is the spark that leads Yammara to tell his story and that of Ricardo Laverde, trying to find out how the drug trafficking business marked the private lives of those who were born with him.
The shape of the ruins
A novel about chance made causality; about the possibility that some conspiranoic is right; about events far apart in time and space but that end up exploding to shape the ruins.
In 2014, Carlos Carballo was arrested for trying to steal from a museum the cloth suit of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a political leader assassinated in Bogotá in 1948. Carballo is a tormented man who seeks signs to unravel the mysteries of a past that haunts him . But no one, not even his closest friends, suspects the deep reasons for his obsession.
What connects the murders of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, whose death split Colombia's history in two, and John F. Kennedy? In what way can a crime that occurred in 1914, that of the liberal Colombian senator Rafael Uribe Uribe, mark the life of a man in the XNUMXst century?
For Carballo everything is connected, and coincidences do not exist. After a fortuitous encounter with this mysterious man, the writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez is forced to delve into the secrets of someone else's life, while facing the darkest moments of the Colombian past.
A compulsive reading, as beautiful and deep as it is passionate, and a masterful investigation into the uncertain truths of a country that has not yet become known.
Songs for the fire
We go there with a foray into the short story. Where every author must show that special ability, that gift to synthesize without losing intensity, that ability to develop a plot that ends up exploding or imploding before the watchful eyes of a reader who feels in front of what is written by a conjurer of literature.
Because the story and the tale are more than a genre, they are the crucible of the first ideas, where the essentials of the good writer turned alchemist merge.
A photographer understands something that she would rather not understand. A Korean War veteran confronts his past during a seemingly harmless encounter. After finding a book from 1887 online, a writer ends up discovering the life of an exciting woman.
The characters of Songs for the fire they are men and women touched by violence, from near or far, directly or only tangentially, whose lives are forever changed by a chance encounter or by the action of incomprehensible forces.
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