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A review by agotakristof
The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
5.0
Those who teach creative writing often talks about the "marathon of the middle" - the struggle of a writer to make the mid part of a big novel engaging and some writers even quit at this point (including, of course the readers). This novel has a middle like that, where the narration delves into a sub plot and dwells there for such a long time, you start wondering how he's going pull it off (esp if you have tendency like me to check how many pages are left and wonder how the whole thing's going to go, 🙂 ) - but Vasquez is smart and accomplished and he even manages to end the novel on a high note. This final part settled the rating thing for me (it's a 5 star book, out and out).
Here he deals with a lot of conspiracy theories (including how the WTC collapsed on 9/11 or how America was forced to get involved in WWII ) - there is even a nightly radio show where the narrator, the author himself, gets invited, dedicated to conspiracy theories where callers dial in to discuss them. The show is hosted by a man called Carballo, whom he meets at a party and asks Vasquez to write a novel about the assassination of Gaitan, a famous Columbian politician, at the height of his career. Novel goes from there to a thick subplot and draws parallels between Gaitan and another assassination of a liberal politician that happened a few decades before (at the beginning of the novel Gaitan's murder's compared with that of Kennedy - for the striking similarities of their deaths). Its quite impressive to see how everything unfolds. Vasquez is at his best here.
“HERE ARE TWO WAYS to view or contemplate what we call history: one is the accidental vision, for which history is the fateful product of an infinite chain of irrational acts, unpredictable contingencies, and random events (life as unremitting chaos that we human beings try desperately to organize); and the other is the conspiratorial vision, a scenario of shadows and invisible hands and eyes that spy and voices that whisper in corners, a theater in which everything happens for a reason, where accidents don’t exist and much less coincidences, and where the causes of events are silenced for reasons nobody knows. “In politics, nothing happens by accident,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said. “If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” - says the narrator towards the end.
I don't know how much of these incidents described in the novel are factual but Vasquez makes them almost believable. It’s the last part where he touches upon the personal story of Carballo that takes the novel to another level, one that also elevates Craballo’s character and his intentions in pursuing the writer over the years to make him write about what he knew.
This novel is my front runner for this year’s Booker.
Here he deals with a lot of conspiracy theories (including how the WTC collapsed on 9/11 or how America was forced to get involved in WWII ) - there is even a nightly radio show where the narrator, the author himself, gets invited, dedicated to conspiracy theories where callers dial in to discuss them. The show is hosted by a man called Carballo, whom he meets at a party and asks Vasquez to write a novel about the assassination of Gaitan, a famous Columbian politician, at the height of his career. Novel goes from there to a thick subplot and draws parallels between Gaitan and another assassination of a liberal politician that happened a few decades before (at the beginning of the novel Gaitan's murder's compared with that of Kennedy - for the striking similarities of their deaths). Its quite impressive to see how everything unfolds. Vasquez is at his best here.
“HERE ARE TWO WAYS to view or contemplate what we call history: one is the accidental vision, for which history is the fateful product of an infinite chain of irrational acts, unpredictable contingencies, and random events (life as unremitting chaos that we human beings try desperately to organize); and the other is the conspiratorial vision, a scenario of shadows and invisible hands and eyes that spy and voices that whisper in corners, a theater in which everything happens for a reason, where accidents don’t exist and much less coincidences, and where the causes of events are silenced for reasons nobody knows. “In politics, nothing happens by accident,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said. “If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” - says the narrator towards the end.
I don't know how much of these incidents described in the novel are factual but Vasquez makes them almost believable. It’s the last part where he touches upon the personal story of Carballo that takes the novel to another level, one that also elevates Craballo’s character and his intentions in pursuing the writer over the years to make him write about what he knew.
This novel is my front runner for this year’s Booker.