March 1, 2021
A soldier recalls pain both intimate and large-scale, a photographer pries into the traumatic past of a fellow guest at a ranch, and the story of a woman buried next to a graveyard follows a winding path from France to Colombia. From International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner V�squez.
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Starred review from July 19, 2021
Vásquez (The Sound of Things Falling), a Dublin Literary Award–winning Colombian novelist and journalist, delivers a bravura collection blending autofiction with stories of historical and personal trauma, each told by an unnamed Colombian novelist and journalist living in Barcelona. In “Double,” the narrator receives a letter from Antonio Wolf, father of his grade school classmate Ernesto, who died during military service 10 years earlier, in which Antonio confesses that he’d hated the writer for not being drafted instead of Ernesto. In “Bad News,” a Barcelona journalist recalls meeting U.S. expatriate John Regis in a Paris hotel while watching the 1998 World Cup. Regis had told him the story of his best friend, a pilot who was killed in a helicopter crash in Málaga. Several years later, during a visit to Málaga, the narrator tracks down the pilot’s widow at a nearby U.S. base, in search of a story. In the standout title story, prefaced with the line, “This is the saddest story I have ever heard,” the narrator’s research on the murders of two Colombian revolutionaries leads him to unravel a mystery, and Vásquez unearths the regrets and choices that define the narrator and those he engages with. Vásquez continues to distinguish himself among the finest writers from Latin America.
Starred review from July 1, 2021
Prodigious author, journalist, and translator V�squez (Reputations, 2016), one of South America's most important writers, is once again deftly translated by award-winning Canadian McLean. Four stories provokingly manipulate time. In "Woman on the Riverbank," a war photographer briefly encounters a politician's assistant at a remote ranch and again 20 years later. Death separates teen BFFs in "The Double" until the surviving friend is scathingly confronted by his late friend's aging father after achieving literary success. "Frogs" presents a deserter posing as a veteran who recognizes a woman who paid for his help decades prior. "Bad News" reveals a Colombian expat in Paris who listens to an American's story only to learn a different truth nine years later. Families can't save their own in "Us" when a missing Colombian commits suicide in Florida, and in "The Last Corrido," an L.A. band's founding member performs his final tour. Violence haunts "Airport," in which a Colombian writer in Paris is cast as an extra in Roman Polanski's Ninth Gate, and "The Boys" is a tale about teens who create a power structure with their fists. The titular "Songs for the Flames"--the best for last--traces the harrowing life and death of a rule-breaking, French-born Colombian woman. Disturbing yet necessary, V�squez's fiction becomes enduring testimony.
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August 1, 2021
Dark pasts catch up with the protagonists of this collection from the veteran Colombian novelist. The nine stories in V�squez's second collection generally turn on a past lie or misdeed that won't be easily put to rest. In "The Double," a man recalls all but condemning a schoolmate to military service that winds up killing him and that death's long aftereffects on the young man's family. The narrator of "Frogs" deserts from the army just before a scheduled deployment to the Korean War, a memory stirred by a chance meeting with a woman he helped through her own crisis at the time. In "The Last Corrido," the lead singer of a musical troupe is in decline but fending off a young rival replacement, exemplifying the tension between the past and the future. Though these characters are flawed, often unethical, V�squez withholds stern moral judgment; "Us," for instance, mocks the urge to find simple, satisfying answers for a man's disappearance. As ever, V�squez is concerned with his home country's history, but the shorter form gives his prose a welcome tightness; each story (via McLean's translation) is crisp and conversational. Still, he can infuse historical breadth to the short form: The closing, title story concerns the unfortunate fate of Aurelia, a free-spirited woman and one-time newspaper columnist whose family was consumed by the country's 1948 civil war. Throughout, V�squez paints a picture of a country that's constantly buffeted by violent political rivalries, narcos, and war and where even bystanders get drawn in. "They're sending us far away to get killed so there won't be so many of us they'll have to kill here," a soldier cracks in "Frogs," and that note of fatalism runs through the whole book. A bracing set of stories about smaller traumas embedded among a country's larger crises.
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