The heart of Colombia’s darkness

What makes Colombia remind me of Ireland? It’s not only the soft rain that falls from grey skies on the emerald uplands around Bogotá. In both countries, ingrained habits of courtesy and charm can smooth over the jagged rifts left by a history of strife.

Raised in Bogotá, and living there again after a decade in Barcelona, Juan Gabriel Vásquez writes novels in which elegant mazes of legend and rumour lead, step by graceful step, into the guilty secrets of ‘this country sick with hatred’. Perhaps only an accident of genius enthroned Gabriel García Márquez, with his hyperbolic Caribbean imagination, as the carnival king of his nation’s fiction. With Vásquez, in contrast, characters throw up a veiling mist of polite refinement and witty euphemism, of hearsay, anecdote and speculation. It often cloaks what his latest narrator calls ‘the cesspool of Colombian history’.

As in his previous novels, such as The Informers and The Sound of Things Falling, The Shape of the Ruins cunningly lures us into the labyrinth where skulk the ‘monsters of violence’ that have tormented Colombia. With a narrator named Vásquez, who shares the author’s own trajectory, the story plays with the masks of ‘autofiction’. A note warns readers, though, that it plunders past and present realities ‘with the liberties characteristic of the literary imagination’.

Still, the pair of political assassinations that this ‘Vásquez’ investigates happened as he tells them. As his premature twin daughters fight for life, the narrator’s sense of vulnerability in ‘this country where people kill others all the time’ drives him back towards the heart of national darkness. In April 1948, the killing of the reformist politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán — often viewed as the Colombian JFK — plunged Bogotá into bloody riots and let slip the dogs of civil war (Vásquez nods often to Julius Caesar).