‘I’m fascinated by reality’

One of Colombia’s most inventive and powerful novelists, Juan Gabriel Vásquez lifts the magic with which Marquez recreated Latin America and replaces it with realism

Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Photo: Hermance Triay

Juan Gabriel Vásquez is a Colombian novelist who has worked against the tide of magic realism by offering us fictional universes that have, as he describes it, “one foot in the mud of reality”. He favours language that is sparse, although he is not averse to the poetic. His last novel, The Sound of Things Falling , examined the 40-year Colombian drug trade. It won the Impac award and the Alfaguara Prize, among others. Reputations , his most recent novel, is set in his hometown Bogotá and its protagonist, Javier Mallarino, is a political cartoonist. It is a quiet but strangely insisting novel that seeks to capture the fading world of newspapers, the problems of censorship, and the trickery of memory.

Excerpts from a conversation:

Memory, and the vagaries of memory, seem to be the crux of all your books. In Reputations you’re examining the eroded memories of individuals, a city (Bogotá), and a country (Colombia). Why this obsession with memory?

Maybe I’m wrong, but literature seems to me the only way to visit a certain kind of past in a certain way. The past is so fragile, isn’t it? It dies, it goes away, and sometimes we don’t even know what really happened there, because memory is such a fallible instrument.

Reputations is the most intimate novel I’ve written because it deals with the fragility of memory; the great secret in the book, the central mystery, is what happened during one night, and this is what the characters discover: that memory is the only way to access that moment.

But memory plays tricks on us. My characters have to deal with them.

“Forgetfulness was the only democratic thing in Colombia,” you write. As I was reading your book, I was reminded of Héctor Abad’s Oblivion , and wondered whether you saw the act of remembering as a particularly important political tool for the Colombian writer?

I do, in fact. My attraction to Colombian history comes from the fact that it keeps surprising me, throwing me off balance. I think this is the reason most novelists write about their birthplaces: you think you know the place you grew up in, you think the place has no secrets, and one day you realise there are dark shadows in its past, that the understanding you had was an illusion. So, of course, the act of remembering becomes essential. Writing novels comes from dissatisfaction, a feeling of rebellion, even of sheer confusion. I write because I don’t understand. I write to make some sense of the chaos and the pain that I’ve seen and experienced. And in the process, we keep certain truths from disappearing into oblivion.

Your protagonist, Javier Mallarino, is a political cartoonist. What made you choose this profession for him? And while writing the book, were you thinking as well of the editorial cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo who were killed?

Oh, no. Reputations was published in Spanish in April 2013; the Charlie Hebdo tragedy happened many months later. But it was a sad reminder of one of the underlying themes of the book: the subversive power of humour, the way caricature can touch the deepest vulnerabilities of many people.

Why did I choose a cartoonist? Because my original idea was to explore the life of Ricardo Rendón, a great political cartoonist of the 1920s. His life, influence and suicide have always fascinated me. But in the end, I became more interested in dealing with a present-day cartoonist who would be an inheritor, so to speak, of Rendón’s, and who has to deal with our contemporary relationship to political cartoons and contemporary frame of mind.

You’ve mixed real and invented characters in your previous books. Why do you like this mix of reality and fiction?

My novels always have one foot in the mud of reality: I can’t write any other way. I am fascinated and stimulated by reality, even if that tends to get me into trouble with the descendants of real characters — or even, sometimes, with the characters themselves. My novels always stem from personal experience, in one way or another, and part of that experience is a feeling of tension with reality — the feeling that history or politics or that thing we call life is always hiding its secrets from us. Novels are the way to go there — whether it’s a very public place in history or a private place in the characters’ memory — and come back with the news.

You spent many years away from Bogotá, but moved back some years ago. In a way, you are always writing about Colombia. Could you talk about the impact that geographical distance has when you're writing about a place? Does it matter where you are ?

It has an effect, yes. It took me several years to learn to write about my country, and in the end it was that distance that allowed me to do it. I need to feel a certain strangeness. In order to write about something, I need to feel that I don’t understand it. So, looking at Colombia from that distance provided that feeling of alienation necessary to send the moral sounding line that a novel is. When I came back to Colombia, I was afraid that strangeness would go away. It turned out that, after 16 years abroad, the country had become even more incomprehensible.

You talk about the power of a political cartoonist. He’s largely anonymous in terms of recognisability and yet his work is known by many. Do you feel that as a writer you share the same privilege?

No. I chose a cartoonist because he has a very special kind of power. First of all, he deals with humour. You can answer words with words, but as a victim of a cartoon, trying to answer will only make you look foolish. That gives a cartoonist a sort of impunity and feeds his power.

What I feel as a novelist, on the other hand, is that anonymity is no longer one of our commodities. Unless you are Thomas Pynchon (and I have no desire to be him), your readers will eventually know you.

You’ve always spoken about the need to have an alternative to Marquez’s magic realism in Colombian literature. Do you feel there are now enough Colombian writers who are translated and read across the world, who are upholding a different kind of Latin American writing tradition?

Magical realism is one of the many ways fiction penetrates Latin American life and illuminates it. But fiction is a vehicle to explore and discover new places, and magical realism no longer does that: it has grown stale, predictable and derivative. Perhaps it still has things to discover in other parts of the world, but not in ours. This is what I mean.

As for Colombian writers, we are as diverse as our Latin American tradition in the ways we go at that thing we call experience. Only time will tell if our attempts deserve the attention of a wider public.