A review by venneh
Les Dénonciateurs by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

4.0

I picked this up after having read The Sound of Things Falling and Reputations because I wanted a longer read and because I was interested in what I saw from the summary. While the relationship between the father and the son is definitely central to this book, what happened to a family friend, who is a German immigrant to Colombia who came over in the 30s, how her and her father’s history intertwine, and how people view his father (and to some degree, the author and his writings) for it is where the story really unfolds. There’s also the divide of private memory versus public/cultural memory, and how that can play into the writing and consumption of a book. Seeing how the personal narratives end up tying into the truth and the moral ambiguity that unfolds is great, and probably one of the rare cases of the hype on the back of the book living up to the book itself (The Independent making the comparison of “a mature John LeCarre wander[ing] into the narrative labyrinths of Borges”). I highly recommend picking this up, and also doing a bit of diving into Colombia during WWII.