The Informers
by Juan Gabriel Vasquez
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Book Summary Information
Author: Juan Gabriel VasquezTranslator: Anne McLean
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2009-07-30
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Book Reviews of The Informers
Book Review: Shadows of history: Case for Colombia
Summary: 4 Stars
One hallmark of a gifted novelist is the ability to see the potential for compelling fiction in an incident, anecdote or scrap of history, no matter how dry or seemingly obscure, that others have overlooked. By that standard and several others, the career of Juan Gabriel Vásquez, a Colombian writer born in 1973, is off to a notable start with "The Informers," his ambitious first english translated novel from his native spanish.
His topic is one of the least-known episodes of World War II. Fearful of Nazi influence in Latin America, the United States, acting through J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I. and the State Department, compiled a list of suspected Axis sympathizers and then pressured compliant governments to intern those named, often on the basis of sketchy or dubious intelligence.
Anti-Fascist refugees from Germany and Italy, along with the descendants of immigrants from those countries and Japan, were snared in that net and frequently imprisoned together with real Nazis. There were other abuses: corrupt government officials and covetous neighbors would sometimes falsely accuse prosperous émigrés, hoping to gain control of their expropriated businesses and homes.
"The system of blacklists gave power to the weak, and the weak are the majority," one character in "The Informer" muses bitterly. "That was life during those years: a dictatorship of weakness. The dictatorship of resentment," in which there were thousands "who accused, who denounced, who informed."
The parallels with the contemporary war on terror are clear, though Mr. Vásquez chooses not to make them explicit. In remarks last year to the PEN American Center, he recalled Balzac's maxim that "novels are the private histories of nations," and that is the approach he deftly applies here, telling his story through the experience of three families.
At the start of "The Informers," a young Bogotá writer named Gabriel Santoro has just written a book about the Enemy Alien Control Program, as Washington called it, based on the recollections of Sara Guterman, an elderly German Jewish émigré and family friend. To his shock and distress his father, a distinguished professor of law and oratory also named Gabriel, savages the book in a review, causing a rift between the two.
The novel is constructed across four dates. The first is 1988, when journalist Gabriel Santoro stumbles on one of the hidden parts of Colombian history: the story of how Germans and Austrians were treated during the second world war. At first, those who opposed Hitler were regarded in the same way as Nazi sympathisers, but when President Santos took Colombia into the war on the side of the allies, Nazi sympathisers had their businesses confiscated and found themselves interned as possible spies and fifth columnists. The book Gabriel writes about this, A Life in Exile, is generally well received, except by his own father, who writes a damning criticism of it.
Gabriel's father then distances himself from his son, only relenting when he faces a heart operation and asks to see him. The operation gives the old man a new lease of life, but he dies suddenly in a car crash a few months later. As a result of his death, Gabriel tries to discover more about his father's early life; he is horrified to find out from an old friend that his father was one of the second world war informers. Worse, he informed on a family of close friends, who were resolutely anti-Nazi, with terrible consequences.
Gabriel wants to know more about the exact circumstances surrounding his father's death. He knows that he travelled to the city of Medellín with the young woman who had become his lover, but not why he wanted to make the trip. When he does find out, it takes him back once again to the tragic days of the war, and the betrayals and failed loyalties that seem to characterise the life of almost every character in the book.
What the narrator learns about his father spurs him to write another book, this time a fictional recreation of what might have happened not only during the war, but in his father's last moments. There is a further twist when the friend betrayed by his father reads the book, and tells him his father came to see him the day before he died. Gabriel sets out for Medellín with the hope of uncovering what transpired between the two men, who had not seen each other for more than 40 years. As so often in real life, the result leaves more questions than it answers.
Vásquez shows a mastery of technique and language. The examination of the consequences that a single act can have not only for the person committing it but also, through the ripple effect, for many others brings us into the territory of another Spanish writer, Miguel de Unamuno and his novel "Mist"(Niebla). The novel may not have the fireworks of magical realism, but its sure construction of narrative and vivid portrayal of a wide array of characters build an extraordinary tale, one which reminds the reader that any novel can be a fascinating mixture of magic and realism.
Summary of The Informers
When Gabriel Santoro publishes his first book, A Life in Exile, it never occurs to him that his father, a distinguished professor of rhetoric, will write a devastating review in a leading newspaper. The subject seems inoffensive enough: the life of a German Jewish woman (a close family friend) who arrived in Colombia shortly before the Second World War. So why does his father attack him so viciously? Do the pages of his book unwittingly hide some dangerous secret? As Gabriel sets out to discover what lies behind his father's anger, he finds himself undertaking an examination of the duplicity, guilt and obsession at the heart of Colombian society in World War II, when the introduction of blacklists of German immigrants corrupted and destroyed many lives. Half a century later, in a gripping narrative that unpacks like a set of Russian dolls, one treacherous act perpetrated in those dark days returns with a vengeance, leading the reader towards a literal, moral and metaphorical cliff edge. With a tightly honed plot, deftly crafted situations, and a cast of complex and varied characters, The Informers is a fascinating novel of callous betrayal, complicit secrecy and the long quest for redemption in a secular, cynical world. It heralds the arrival of a major literary talent.Book Description
A virtuosic novel about family, history, memory, and betrayal from the brightest new Latin American literary talent working today.
When Gabriel Santoro's biography is scathingly reviewed by his own father, a public intellectual and famous Bogotá rhetorician, Gabriel could not imagine what had pierced his icy exterior to provoke such a painful reaction. A volume that catalogues the life of Sara Guterman, a longtime family friend and Jewish immigrant, since her arrival in Colombia in the 1930s, A Life in Exile seemed a slim, innocent exercise in recording modern history. But as a devastated Gabriel delves, yet again, into Sara's story, searching for clues to his father's anger, he cannot yet see the sinister secret buried in his research that could destroy his father's exalted reputation and redefine his own.
After his father's mysterious death in a car accident a few years later, Gabriel sets out anew to navigate half a century of half-truths and hidden meanings. With the help of Sara Guterman and his father's young girlfriend, Angelina, layer after shocking layer of Gabriel's world falls away and a complex portrait of his father emerges from the ruins. From the streets of 1940s Bogotá to a stranger's doorstep in 1990s Medellín, he unravels the web of doubt, betrayal, and guilt at the core of his father's life and he wades into a dark, longsilenced period of Colombian history after World War II.
With a taut, riveting narrative and achingly beautiful prose, Juan Gabriel Vásquez delivers an expansive, powerful exploration of the sins of our fathers, of war's devastating psychological costs, and of the inescapability of the past. A novel that has earned Vásquez comparisons to Sebald, Borges, Roth, and Márquez, The Informers heralds the arrival of a major literary talent.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez on The Informers
In 1999, three years after leaving Colombia, I travelled back to spend the holiday season with my family. I didn't go looking for stories; but four or five days before the end of the century, I met a woman of German-Jewish origin who had arrived in Colombia in 1938, and a story came to me. She had fled with her family from Emmerich, her hometown, when she was thirteen; her father opened a hotel in the small provincial city of Duitama, a couple of hours from Bogotá; the hotel's reputation, particularly among politicians, ensured them a good living. Then the war started. Colombia broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, and Colombian authorities began persecuting enemy citizens?Nazi spies, Nazi sympathizers, Nazi propagandists?but also citizens who, while not declared enemies, were deemed dangerous to the security of the hemisphere. Blacklists were brought into play, informers hired, and soon a German name was cause for suspicion, and feelings of mistrust and paranoia?all this a few years before the rise of McCarthyism in the United States?surrounded the German community in Colombia. After that, things got out of hand. The woman told me all this. I wanted to know more; so she sat with me for three days and patiently dictated her life to me. I wrote on a hotel notepad, staggered by the story, but more so by the fact that she was telling it to me with such freedom, such eagerness. At the time, I didn't know I would use that conversation as the narrative backbone of a novel. In fact, I seriously doubted I would use it at all: in those days, my fiction amounted to a group of stories set in France and the Belgian Ardennes, places I had lived in, watched closely with a writer's eyes, and felt I understood. I had never written about my country, mainly because I didn't understand it, and I had grown up believing one should only write about what one knows. Sometime in the middle of 2002 I realized how mistaken that advice was. I realized not understanding something is perhaps the best reason to write about it; I realized my favorite novels were, with rare exceptions, novels of inquiry, of investigation. From Conrad's Under Western Eyes to Sebald's The Emigrants, certain works of fiction give us the sense that in writing them authors are entering an undiscovered country. They seem to know their story no better than their narrators; we read them and feel that writing, for them, is finding out.
In writing The Informers, I wanted to find out about the way the war was experienced in Colombia: about the existence of a Nazi party there, about the blacklists, about the way my generation has inherited the consequences of what happened in those years. After my interviews in 1999, I had a whole life written down in notepads; my task was to transform it and then to invent other lives that would bring the historical moment to the surface. My task, in other words, was to look for that place where private secrets cross paths with public ones, and shed a little light on it. "Novels," said Balzac, "are the private history of nations." That idea carried me through the writing of The Informers.
(Photo © Peter Drubin)
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