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A review by barel93
La forma de las ruinas by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Do you ever like the idea of a book more than the book itself? The Shape of the Ruins falls squarely in that category. Objectively, I should love it. But something about it does not work for me. I had to force myself to finish reading it. I think the most frustrating thing about it is that the first and last chapter are fantastic. When you realise Carballo's motivations, I think the entire book makes much more sense, but to get to that sort of catharsis you have to muddle through almost 500 pages that read like someone's undergraduate dissertation about two important moments in Colombian history.
The Shape of the Ruins reminded me of James Wood's review of Emma Cline's "The Girls." In his review, Wood praises Cline's style but questions if there was really a reason for the book's existence. I don't ascribe to the idea that a book needs a larger reason to exist (political, historical or otherwise), but the Wood's question morphed in my mind to something different: is there anything in The Shape of the Ruins that could not have been written by someone else? I mean, this book is just a narrative history with some personal history thrown in.
And the problem is not just the generic nature of the book itself, is that Vásquez succumbs to the blandest clichés in his writing, both with regards to the framing of the book and its prose style. For example, I was wrote down some notes about the book during my reading, including one where I mentioned that the larger argument seemed to be that Colombia's violent past seeps into its present and lo and behold, a few hundred pages later Vásquez uses a very similar phrasing to express the exact same idea. And this one of many instances where Vásquez relies on linguistic cliches and imagery to put describe the violence that Colombians have inherited because of their fraught history.
I guess my final verdict for this book can be resumed in one word: underwhelming.
The Shape of the Ruins reminded me of James Wood's review of Emma Cline's "The Girls." In his review, Wood praises Cline's style but questions if there was really a reason for the book's existence. I don't ascribe to the idea that a book needs a larger reason to exist (political, historical or otherwise), but the Wood's question morphed in my mind to something different: is there anything in The Shape of the Ruins that could not have been written by someone else? I mean, this book is just a narrative history with some personal history thrown in.
And the problem is not just the generic nature of the book itself, is that Vásquez succumbs to the blandest clichés in his writing, both with regards to the framing of the book and its prose style. For example, I was wrote down some notes about the book during my reading, including one where I mentioned that the larger argument seemed to be that Colombia's violent past seeps into its present and lo and behold, a few hundred pages later Vásquez uses a very similar phrasing to express the exact same idea. And this one of many instances where Vásquez relies on linguistic cliches and imagery to put describe the violence that Colombians have inherited because of their fraught history.
I guess my final verdict for this book can be resumed in one word: underwhelming.