The All Saints’ Day Lovers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez review – shotguns, betrayals and freshly opened wounds

Seven stories from the Impac prizewinner powerfully dramatise the discreet pangs of the Belgian rural bourgeoisie

Hunting and adultery among the inhabitants of the Belgian Ardennes probably aren’t what you’d expect from a Colombian writer best known for a novel about the violence of the Medellín drug cartel (the Impac-prizewinning Sound of Things Falling). But all seven of the stories in Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s elegant new collection are about just that – hounds, horses, the discreet pangs of the Belgian rural bourgeoisie. An author’s note reveals that Vásquez wrote the stories after spending a year in Belgium in 1999, which presumably accounts for the setting, though it doesn’t diminish the faint aura of determined capriciousness about the whole enterprise. Even in this age of globalised fiction it’s unusual to see a writer cultivate a territory as small and specific as this, and seemingly so remote from his own.

The same author’s note also reveals that Vásquez was partly inspired by a comment of Tobias Wolff’s, that “a book of stories should be like a novel in which the characters don’t know each other”, which perhaps explains the many quasi-repetitions that occur throughout, as if the intent was to create a kind of thematic echo chamber in which the same handful of basic motifs recur, continually mirroring and reframing each other. An unanswered telephone, image of a refusal of intimacy in one story, reappears more brutally (its cord ripped out of the wall) as an image of a man’s inability to deal with his wife’s treacherous past. A wounded pheasant whose imagined suffering drives a wedge between the couple in the title story both is, and is not, the same pheasant being plucked and gutted by the wife in the next story along, as she tells her husband she had been planning to leave him. The pompous master of the boar hunt in that same story, whose life is upended by his lovelorn father’s suicide, merges into another self-important huntsman, cuckolded (and worse) in “The Solitude of the Magician”. The shooting of a dog early on in the book performs much the same structural function as the gelding of a horse near the end. And so on. The effect is to give the collection an overall feeling of rigorous, even rather obsessive, unity and coherence. It’s as if we keep approaching the same primal scene with different actors and from slightly different angles.

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