Colombian
writer Juan Gabriel Vasquez gained considerable critical notice (and a number
of literary awards) in 2013 for his novel The Sound of Things Falling, which explores
the impact of Colombia’s recent violent drug culture on people’s individual
lives, even years after the old drug regime has been overthrown (a similar
novel was written in 1975 by Peruvian
and Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa – Conversation in the Cathedral – about the
impact of military dictatorship).
Later
this month (July 21, to be precise), Gabriel Vasquez is publishing a collection
of short stories, Lovers on All Saints’ Day, that were
first written when he was living in Belgium and Barcelona. Describing them, he
quotes the writer Tobias Wolff: “a book of stories should be like a novel in
which the characters don’t know each other.”
And
that is exactly how this collection of stories reads.
Six
of the seven stories are set in Belgium, mostly in the Ardennes Forest region
but also including Brussels and smaller towns (one story is in Paris). Each is
about relationships, and mostly husband-wife relationships. Each is about
deterioration of those relationships. And each is about time, and how the past
is never really past but always a part of the present, and the future.
In
“Hiding Places,” a freelance writer visits friends in Brussels, and walks into
a family tragedy. In “The All Saints’ Day Lovers,” a marriage is evaporating;
the husband spends the night with a café owner who lost her husband in a plane accident,
and each relationship becomes a kind of metaphor for the other. “The Lodger”
concerns what happens with a couple more than 20 years after the wife has an
affair with the husband’s best friend.
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| Juan Gabriel Vasquez |
In
“The Return,” a woman paroled after spent 45 years in prison for killing her
sister’s fiancé comes home, and past and present become intermingled. “At the Café
de la Republique,” a couple recently separated meet so they can visit the
husband’s dying father. In “The Solitude of the Magician,” a woman has an
affair with a magician, ultimately leading to a family tragedy. And “Life on
Grimsey Island” describes two people, she a veterinarian and he the reluctant
owner of his father’s stables, both trying to escape their pasts.
These
are somber stories, filled with loss and tragedy, with people trying to cope
with intense personal loss with little to guide them. The writing is spare; nothing
in these stories is gratuitous. The impression is always clouds, rain and cold.
Each story has a sense of inevitability, as if the characters can’t really
prevent what is going to happen. Or not happen.
Lovers
on All Saints’ Day is a commentary on contemporary relationships. And little
of what Gabriel Vasquez sees is good.
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