KLASSEN ON BOOKS - May 2015 - By John Klassen (Review)
John Klassen
Juan Gabriel Vasquez
Vasquez (1973-) was described by The Guardian as, “among the most inventive and erudite or Colombia’s emerging generation of novelists”. He lived in Paris (1996-1999) and received a doctorate in Latin American Literature from the Sorbonne, followed by Barcelona for about 10 years, until 2012; he now lives in Bogota. Vasquez has written three principal novels: The Informers, The Secret History of Costaguana, and The Sound of Things Falling; the last won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2014; the first South American writer to do so. There were two earlier novels, but Vasquez prefers to ignore them.
The Informers
The main protagonist, Gabriel Santoro, is a journalist in Bogotá who writes a book in 1988 called A Life in Exile, based on the experience of a longtime family friend, Sarah Guterman, a Jewish German immigrant who escaped to Colombia in the 1930s. Describing Sarah’s life touches on the political, social, and class prejudices within the German community in Colombia--pressures exacerbated by the decision of the government to arrest a number of German immigrants and to seize their assets because of suspected Nazi sympathies. One of those arrested, for no good reason, is the father of a close friend of Gabriel’s father, also named Gabriel Santoro; the man, Konrad Dresser, is shattered by the loss of the life he had built in Colombia and he commits suicide after the war. Gabriel’s father, a well-known and well-respected rhetorician, is alive when the book is published but father and son become estranged when Gabriel senior publishes a scathing denunciation of the book and refuses to discuss it with his son. Gabriel senior dies with honours as an exemplary citizen, but his reputation is shattered by revelation of a secret he had hidden ever since the 1940s. Gabriel junior, with the help of Sarah Guterman, begins to unravel the mystery of his father’s life and to deal with the continuing effects of his actions.
We are in the realm of meta-fiction: a novel that references itself and in which the author acknowledges and speaks directly to the reader. The basic story of the novel closes and then, in a “postscript”, Vasquez begins: “A year after finishing it, I published the book that you, reader, have just read. During that year several things happened…” .
Some may yearn for a more traditional narrative arc, but I think this works. It engages the reader and makes you contemplate the universal themes illustrated through the stories of Gabriel Santoro, father and son: the moral dilemmas in perilous times and how some act with courage, others for personal gain or protection or revenge, or by simply not thinking through the devastation that can ripple through families and generations; the fragility of memory that is untrustworthy due to natural and innocent reconstruction or a desire for exculpation but which can be ‘contaminated by knowledge’:
“I know that the past is not stationary, nor is it fixed, in spite of the illusion of documents: so many photographs and letters and films that allow us to think of the immutability of what we’ve seen, what we’ve heard, what we’ve read. No, none of that is definitive. It can take just a tiny detail, something that in the grand scheme of things we consider insignificant, to make a letter relating trivialities become something that determines our lives, to make the innocent man in the photo turn out to have always been our worst enemy. ”
In an interview, Vasquez referred to how Joseph Conrad has influenced him as a writer with, “his obsessive idea that novels go into dark places and come back with the news. It’s not necessarily geographical, but shedding light on the dark places of the soul.” And in another context, Vasquez described history as, “a tale somebody has told us from a biased point of view; it’s only one possibility among many.” According to Vasquez, “Novels give another version, recover truths that have been repressed.” All of these themes weave through The Informers.
Vasquez explores the concept of identity, recognizing that, “Nobody’s what they seem to be. Nobody is ever what they seem to be. Even the simplest person has another face.” And greatly complicating this is the fact that sometimes people remake the face that they present, or they hide or reshape things willfully or innocently; and if the former, they, like Santoro senior, live in constant fear of a “documentary reconstruction” of another life, of the need to defend oneself against “the pain of the facts.”
Another theme that runs through the book is the balance of forgiving, forgetting, and redemption for, and among, the characters in the novel, and on the broader plane of societies, such as Colombia and many others, that have suffered violent internal conflicts. In a debate during Colombia’s peace process and a controversial amnesty for paramilitaries, Vasquez said that it is about,” the past as personal baggage we carry with us as individuals; and the tension between memory and voluntary forgetting; between thinking about the past and suppressing it to move on.” Even though what might be acceptable and manageable at a personal level is not what is required to heal the wounds of a society.
What, in the end, is the ‘truth’ of any actions or motivations? Are these not, perforce, interpreted and internalized through the prisms of individual hopes, fears, and prejudices, so that ‘truth’ is like refracted light, changing with every shift of perspective? And sometimes, whatever the ‘truth’, people just do unthinking and stupid things.
This is a novel that bears contemplation.
Helen Garner
Helen Garner (1942-) is an Australian novelist, short-story writer, non-fiction writer, screenwriter, and journalist. Her first novel, Monkey Grip was published in 1977. She is known for adapting her personal experiences into her novels; The Spare Room is based on the illness and death of a good friend.
The Spare Room
Some writers have the gift of being able to present individuals and the web of interpersonal emotions so often misunderstood in origin and expression and which can run the gamut of love to hate, wrapped in confusion and angst. Helen Garner is such a writer in this fine, short novel. Nicola, a free spirit all her life, is dying of cancer but is so hungry for reassurance about her disease, and so focused on denying it that she falls for all sorts of charlatans who promise miraculous cures with procedures that the medical world distains, so the purveyors claim, only because they don’t understand or because it would undermine their own authorities or practices. Helen is an old friend whom Nicola comes to stay with for three weeks while she pursues her latest grasp at life through a flaky procedure to do with massive doses of Vitamin C and special steam baths.
Helen sees the how the “professionals” prey upon the vulnerabilities, and pocketbooks, of the terminally ill, but she cannot confront Nicola because Nicola is convinced, or at least that is what she presents, that this will cure her and in a matter of weeks she will be as good as new. As Nicola says at one point, “No one wants to know about it, if I’m sad or frightened….I’ve learnt to shut up. And present an optimistic face.” And Nicola feels that she has wasted her life which she knows, in her hearts of hearts, is coming to an end. This is all too much for Helen, exhausted physically and emotionally after a couple of weeks and she finally confronts Nicola: “Why do people love you?...You don’t suppose it could be because of your character? Like for example what a faithful friend you are? Who has never been known to bear a grudge? …Or your bottomless generosity? The way everything you touch becomes beautiful?...What about how funny you are?...the way you listen to people when they talk? You even remember details. When people are with you they feel free. Don’t you know that? You think this is waste?”
This is a novel about love and friendship, about reaching across the boundaries to face the commonality of death, the one because it is personally imminent, the other because she wants to help but in the end it is the place where everyone must go alone and all you can do is show love and friendship and compassion and caring, sometimes in physical care, sometimes in emotional truths. And in the end there might be some sort of conclusion, but there will always be confusion; as Helen thinks the night before Nicola is to fly back home, “I was sick with shame, raging at myself for raging, raging at death for existing, for being so slow with her and so cruel.”
The characters are wonderful, well drawn, sympathetic and real. The writing is as spare as the extra room in Helen’s house, but it flows and its simplicity draws in sharper relief the complex of emotions in play. A wonderful, close, intimate novel.
Tags: John Klassen