Book Description
A virtuosic novel about family, history, memory, and betrayal
from the brightest new Latin American literary talent working
today.
When Gabriel Santoro's biography is scathingly reviewed by his
own her, a public intellectual and famous Bogotá rhetorician,
Gabriel could not imagine what had pierced his icy exterior to
provoke such a painful reaction. A volume that catalogues the
life of Sara Guterman, a longtime family friend and Jewish
immigrant, since her arrival in Colombia in the 1930s, A Life in
Exile seemed a slim, innocent exercise in modern
history. But as a devastated Gabriel delves, yet again, into
Sara's story, searching for clues to his her's anger, he
cannot yet see the sinister secret buried in his research that
could destroy his her's exalted reputation and redefine his
own.
After his her's mysterious death in a car accident a few
years later, Gabriel sets out anew to navigate half a century of
half-truths and hidden meanings. With the help of Sara Guterman
and his her's young girlfriend, Angelina, layer after shocking
layer of Gabriel's world falls away and a complex portrait of his
her emerges from the ruins. From the streets of 1940s Bogotá
to a stranger's doorstep in 1990s Medellín, he unravels the web
of doubt, betrayal, and guilt at the core of his her's life
and he wades into a dark, longsilenced period of Colombian
history after World War II.
With a taut, riveting narrative and achingly beautiful prose,
Juan Gabriel Vásquez delivers an expansive, powerful exploration
of the sins of our hers, of war's devastating psychological
costs, and of the inescapability of the past. A novel that has
earned Vásquez comparisons to Sebald, Borges, Roth, and Márquez,
The Informers heralds the arrival of a major literary talent.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez on The Informers
In 1999, three years after leaving Colombia, I travelled back to
spend the holiday season with my family. I didn't go looking for
stories; but four or five days before the end of the century, I
met a woman of German-Jewish origin who had arrived in Colombia
in 1938, and a story came to me. She had fled with her family
from Emmerich, her hometown, when she was thirteen; her her
opened a hotel in the small provincial city of Duitama, a couple
of hours from Bogotá; the hotel's reputation, particularly among
politicians, ensured them a good living. Then the war started.
Colombia broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, and
Colombian authorities began persecuting enemy citizens—Nazi
spies, Nazi sympathizers, Nazi propagandists—but also citizens
who, while not declared enemies, were deemed dangerous to the
security of the hemisphere. Blacklists were brought into play,
informers hired, and soon a German name was cause for suspicion,
and feelings of mistrust and paranoia—all this a few years before
the rise of McCarthyism in the United States—surrounded the
German community in Colombia. After that, things got out of hand.
The woman told me all this. I wanted to know more; so she sat
with me for three days and patiently dictated her life to me. I
wrote on a hotel notepad, staggered by the story, but more so by
the fact that she was telling it to me with such freedom, such
eagerness. At the time, I didn't know I would use that
conversation as the narrative back of a novel. In fact, I
seriously doubted I would use it at all: in those days, my
fiction aed to a group of stories set in France and the
Belgian Ardennes, places I had lived in, watched closely with a
writer's eyes, and felt I understood. I had never written about
my country, mainly because I didn't understand it, and I had
grown up believing one should only write about what one knows.
Sometime in the middle of 2002 I realized how mistaken that
advice was. I realized not understanding something is perhaps the
best reason to write about it; I realized my favorite novels
were, with rare exceptions, novels of inquiry, of investigation.
From Conrad's Under Western Eyes to Sebald's The Emigrants,
certain works of fiction give us the sense that in writing them
authors are entering an undiscovered country. They seem to know
their story no better than their narrators; we read them and feel
that writing, for them, is finding out.
In writing The Informers, I wanted to find out about the way the
war was experienced in Colombia: about the existence of a Nazi
party there, about the blacklists, about the way my generation
has inherited the consequences of what happened in those years.
After my interviews in 1999, I had a whole life written down in
notepads; my task was to transform it and then to invent other
lives that would bring the historical moment to the surface. My
task, in other words, was to look for that place where private
secrets cross paths with public ones, and shed a little light on
it. "Novels," said Balzac, "are the private history of nations."
That idea carried me through the writing of The Informers.
(Photo © Peter Drubin)
