There are certain things western readers expect from a Colombian novelist, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez (pictured) has made quite a point of avoiding them. His prose is minimal, sharp, clean; his novels are rooted in historical fact and eschew magical realist flights of fancy. He has chosen not to play into the lurid drugs-and-violence vision of his homeland so beloved of Hollywood screenwriters, setting his stories in Belgium (The All Saints’ Day Lovers) and among Colombian Jews and Nazis during the second world war (The Informers). It is no surprise, though, that his biggest success, The Sound of Things Falling, which won the Impac award in 2014, was a sideways look at the drugs trade.
Vásquez’s Colombia is in some ways culturally closer to Europe than it is to Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo and the Caribbean coast. He was brought up in Bogotá, a rainy mountain-top city where traditional dress is a wool suit and overcoat, and after studying at the Sorbonne lived for most of his adult life in Europe; he has always said that his literary influences are European and American. Reputations is his first novel since moving back to Bogotá, and takes place entirely among the educated middle class. This is a world of nice houses in the mountains, of art galleries and cocktail parties. We feel the shadow of many years of political and social tumult only obliquely, in glancing references to “the years of terrorism”, in the characters’ fear of violence. The main character, political cartoonist Javier Mallarino, moved out of the city centre in the 1980s following threats to his life – a decision that, we are told, “had been national news”. He spends his time now at a safe and slightly contemptuous distance from the lottery-ticket sellers and bootblacks down town.
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