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Juan Gabriel Vásquez | |
|---|---|
 Vásquez at the 2016Hay Festival | |
| Born | 1973 (age 51–52) |
| Occupation | Writer, translator, journalist |
| Nationality | Colombian,Spanish |
| Genre | Novel,short story,essay,political commentary |
| Notable awards | Alfaguara de Novela 2011 Prix Roger Caillois 2012 Premio Nacional de Periodismo Simón Bolívar 2007, 2012 Premio Gregor Von Rezzori - Città di Firenze 2013 International Dublin Literary Award 2014 Premio Arzobispo Juan de San Clemente 2014 PremioReal Academia Española 2014 Prémio Casa de América Latina de Lisboa 2016 Prix Carbet des Lycéens 2016 Prémio Literário Casino da Póvoa 2018 Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres 2016 Cruz Oficial de la Orden de Isabel la Católica 2018 |
Juan Gabriel Vásquez (born 1973) is a Colombian writer, journalist and translator. He has written many novels, short stories, literary essays, and numerous articles ofpolitical commentary.
His novelThe Sound of Things Falling, published in Spanish in 2011, won theAlfaguara Novel Prize and the 2014International Dublin Literary Award, among other prizes. His novels have been published in 28 languages. In 2012, after living in Europe for sixteen years, in Paris, the Belgian Ardennes, and Barcelona, Vásquez moved with his family back toBogotá.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born inBogotá in 1973,[1] to Alfredo Vásquez and Fanny Velandia, both lawyers. He began to write at an early age, publishing his first stories in a school magazine at the age of eight. During his teenage years, he began reading the Latin American writers of theboom generation:Gabriel García Márquez,Mario Vargas Llosa andCarlos Fuentes, among others.
In 1990, Vásquez began studying Law at theUniversidad del Rosario. The university is located in downtown Bogotá, surrounded by the streets and historical sites where Vásquez’s novels are set. While studying for his law degree, he voraciously readJorge Luis Borges andJulio Cortázar, among other Latin American authors, and studied the works ofJames Joyce andVirginia Woolf. He graduated in 1996 with a thesis entitledRevenge as a legal prototype in the Iliad, later published by his alma mater. By the time he received his diploma, he had already decided to pursue a career as a writer.
Days after receiving his diploma, Vásquez traveled toParis for post-graduate studies in Latin American literature atLa Sorbonne, which he never finished. He had literary reasons for choosing Paris, as Vásquez associated the city with the works of expatriate authors who had influenced him:Mario Vargas Llosa,Julio Cortázar, andJames Joyce. But he also left Colombia because of the political violence and climate of fear that prevailed in the country since the 1980s.
In Paris, Vásquez finished his first novel,Persona (1997). A short novel set in Florence, it shows the influence of modernism and ofVirginia Woolf, an author to whose work Vásquez has always felt close. After his studies at the Sorbonne, Vásquez abandoned writing a thesis in order to concentrate on fiction. He finished a second novel,Alina suplicante in 1999.
Vásquez later repeatedly expressed his dissatisfaction with his first two books, which he thought of as the works of an apprentice. He has refused to reissue them after their initial publication. Both are short novels with an intimate atmosphere, but otherwise have little in common. Vásquez has said that even before publishingAlina suplicante, his dissatisfaction with these works pitched him into a deep crisis. He left Paris at the beginning of 1999, looking for a place to renew himself.[2]
1999 was a crucial year for Vasquez, both professionally and personally. Between January and September, Vásquez lived near Xhoris, a small town in the Walloon area of Belgium in the home of an older couple in the Ardennes. He has frequently stressed the importance of this period.[3]
His short story "The Messenger" was included inLíneas Aéreas, an anthology that would be regarded as the main forecast of Spanish and Latin American literature in the 21st century. He read the work of novelists who would leave a strong mark on his own work, such asJoseph Conrad andJavier Marías, and also short story writers far from the Latin American tradition, likeChekhov andAlice Munro.[4] His experiences, encounters and observations during that season became the material of his next book, the collection of storiesThe All Saints’ Day Lovers (2001).
In September 1999, Vásquez married Mariana Montoya. They settled in Barcelona. Vásquez has invoked three reasons for choosing that destination: the link between Barcelona and the Latin American Boom, the opportunities the city offered to someone who wanted to earn a living by his pen, and the open spirit with which the new Latin American literature was being received in Spain.[3]
In 2000, Vásquez began working as an editor atLateral, an independent Barcelona magazine that was published between 1994 and 2006. Under the direction of a Hungarian expatriate, Mihály Dés, the magazine brought together a generation of emerging writers such as French novelistMathias Énard and Catalan cultural critic Jordi Carrión. The Chilean novelistRoberto Bolaño was also connected to the magazine.
While working atLateral, Vásquez wrote a series of short stories based on his experiences during the years he spent in France and Belgium.Lovers on All Saints’ Day was published in Colombia in April 2001; although it was well received, evoking comparisons toRaymond Carver andJorge Luis Borges, critics were surprised by the fact that a Colombian author should write a book with Belgian or French characters.[5] The few reviews that appeared in Spain praised the "subtleties of a Central European narrator"[6] and discussed the simultaneous influence ofBorges andHemingway.[7] From then on Vásquez would considerLovers on All Saints’ Day as his first mature book.
During the early years in Barcelona, Vásquez also worked as a translator. He was commissioned to do the first translation published in Spain ofHiroshima, byJohn Hersey. In 2002, after leavingLateral, he concentrated on translation and journalism as ways to earn a living. He wrote articles and book reviews forEl Periódico de Catalunya andEl País, among others. He translatedVictor Hugo’sLast Day of a Condemned Man andJohn Dos Passos’Journeys Between Wars. In 2003, Vásquez publishedNowhere Man (El hombre de ninguna parte), a brief biography ofJoseph Conrad.
The following year, Vásquez published the novel he now regards as his first:The Informers. Its critical reception was extraordinary. The novel was praised byMario Vargas Llosa andCarlos Fuentes.Semana Magazine, one of the most influential Colombian publications, chose it as one of the most important novels published since 1981. In a few years, it was translated into more than a dozen languages.[8] In England, where it was endorsed byJohn Banville, it was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Its publication in the United States in 2009 had an unusual reception for a Latin American writer. InThe New York Times, Larry Rohter wrote: "Vasquez's career takes off remarkably."[9]Jonathan Yardley, inThe Washington Post, said it was "the best work of literary fiction to come my way since 2005".[10] The novel was translated byAnne McLean, who has subsequently translated all of Vásquez’s books.
In September 2005, his twin daughters Martina and Carlota were born in Bogotá. Vasquez's next novel,The Secret History of Costaguana, is dedicated to them. The novel, built on speculation (Joseph Conrad's possible visit to Colombia in the 1870s), confirmed Vásquez's reputation. He establishes a dialogue with the life and work of Conrad, in particular his novelNostromo, and with the Colombian history of the 19th century, especially the building of thePanama Canal. His narrator has a picaresque and sarcastic tone, constantly addressing the reader, having recourse toanachronisms, exaggerations, and improbability whenever it suits his yarn. According to Spanish novelistsJuan Marsé andEnrique Vila-Matas, Vásquez creates a powerful dialogue between the narrator and the reader, as well as between fiction and history.
The Secret History of Costaguana is also an indirect comment on Vásquez's relationship with the work ofGabriel García Márquez. It is an issue to which he has returned many times discussing the idea of influence. In one of his articles he wrote:
That right to mix traditions and languages with impunity - to unapologetically look for contamination, to break with the staggered national or linguistic loyalties that tormented Colombian writers until recently - is, perhaps, the great legacy of García Márquez …One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book that can be admired infinitely, but whose teachings are hardly applicable (the proof is what happens to its copycats). So I will repeat here what I have said elsewhere: no Colombian writer with a minimum of ambition would dare to follow through the paths already explored by the works of García Márquez; but no writer with a minimum of common sense would underestimate the possibilities that this work has opened for us.[11]
In 2007, Vásquez was included inBogotá 39, aHay Festival project that brought together the most notable Latin American writers under 39 years of age. That same year he began writing opinion pieces forEl Espectador, the most prominent liberal Colombian newspaper. In his columns he was deeply critical of the governments ofÁlvaro Uribe in Colombia andHugo Chávez in Venezuela. His political positions seem to defend freedom as a supreme value and an open, secular and liberal society:
For me it is still relevant for a novelist to participate in the social debate. For a philosopher too, for that matter; in any case, someone who thinks about reality in moral terms. Politicians do not usually do it, least of all in my country. The great contemporary debates in societies such as mine, about the legalization of drugs, about gay marriage, about abortion - politicians are never able to take them to the field of moral discussion, which is where they should be discussed. They discuss them in religious terms, they discuss them in political terms (in the most banal sense of the word). But they rarely try to understand these things from the point of view of individuals. Who are we hurting? Whose lives are we destroying or seriously affecting with a decision? This is not what they talk about.[12]
In 2008, Vásquez published a compilation of literary essays entitledThe Art of Distortion (El arte de la distorsión in Spanish). That same year, he was invited to theSanta Maddalena Foundation, a retreat for writers located inTuscany, Italy. There he began writing his novelThe Sound of Things Falling.
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Published in April 2011,The Sound of Things Falling was awarded theAlfaguara Prize and became one of the major Colombian novels of recent decades. The Colombian writerHéctor Abad Faciolince saluted it as “the best verbal creation I have read in all the Colombian literature of recent times”.[13] The novel provoked similar enthusiasm in translation. In Italy, it won thePremio Gregor von Rezzori-Città di Firenze; with the English translation, Vásquez became the first Latin American and the second Spanish-language author to win theInternational IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The French translation was instrumental to Vásquez being awarded thePrix Roger Caillois; in the United States, the novel appeared on the cover ofThe New York Times Book Review, whereEdmund White called it “A brilliant new novel...gripping...absorbing right to the end”.Lev Grossman, inTime magazine, wrote about Vásquez:
Vásquez is often compared toRoberto Bolaño, another Latin American writer in full flight from magical realism. […] Like Bolaño, he is a master stylist and a virtuoso of patient pacing and intricate structure, and he uses the novel for much the same purpose as Bolaño did: to map the deep, cascading damage done to our world by greed and violence and to concede that even love can't repair it.[14]
In 2012, after sixteen years in Europe, Vásquez returned with his family to Colombia. The following year he was writer in residence atStanford University, in California, United States. There he finished the short novelReputations, the story of a political cartoonist. The book was published in April 2013 and went to win theRoyal Spanish Academy Award and the Prémio Casa de América Latina de Lisboa, among others. After publication in the United States,The New York Review of Books called it Vásquez's "most intelligent and persuasive work":
With his book of Belgian short stories and his five Colombian novels, Vásquez has accumulated an impressive body of work, one of the most striking to have emerged in Latin America so far this century … Like Conrad’s best novels, Vásquez’s are tautly written—every line is charged with acute observation and analysis. In this he also recalls Borges, albeit in a more down-to-earth, nonmetaphysical mode.[15]
In August 2014, Vásquez left his weekly column inEl Espectador, but continues to write occasional opinion pieces. He was frequently moved to write by the peace negotiations that the Colombian government was carrying out in Havana, Cuba, with theFARC guerrilla. InEl País (Madrid) andThe Guardian (London), he repeatedly defended the peace process and the need to put an end to the war that has ravaged his country during the last decades.[16][17][18] He has been one of the most vocal supporters of the peace agreements. In 2015, Vásquez publishedThe Shape of the Ruins. It is his most challenging novel, as it mixes various genres to explore the consequences of two murders that have marked Colombian history: those ofRafael Uribe Uribe (1914) andJorge Eliécer Gaitán (1948). The novel was very well received both in Colombia and abroad. Interviewed by Colombian magazineArcadia, Vásquez said:
The Shape of the Ruins is by far the most difficult challenge that I have faced as a novelist. In part, this is due to everything the novel tries to do at the same time: it is an autobiography, a historical exploration, a criminal novel, a conspiracy theory, a meditation on what we are as a country ... I had to write 26 different versions to discover the one that best suited the book. Or rather: the one that was able to put everything together in the same plot[19].
With the novel, Vásquez became the first Latin American to win the Premio Casino da Póvoa, Portugal’s most prestigious award for fiction in translation. The novel was also shortlisted for the Premio Bienal de Novela Mario Vargas Llosa and for theMan Booker International Prize. InThe New York Review of Books,Ariel Dorfman wrote:
Juan Gabriel Vásquez … has succeeded García Márquez as the literary grandmaster of Colombia, a country that can boast of many eminent authors … Readers might expect that Vásquez has written a noir detective novel that investigates a crime that has gone unpunished for seventy years and restores some semblance of justice. Nothing, however, is that orderly inThe Shape of the Ruins, which subverts the crime genre, presenting the hunt for culprits within the frame of what seems to be aSebaldian memoir.
In 2016 the Barcelona-based publisher Navona commissioned Vásquez to translate one of his favorite novels,Joseph Conrad'sHeart of Darkness. The same translation was published by Angosta Editores, a small Colombian press owned by the writerHéctor Abad Faciolince.
In February 2017, Vásquez was invited by theUniversity of Bern to occupy theFriedrich Dürrenmatt chair. The result of these courses was a collection of essays around the art of the novel:Travels with a Blank Map (Viajes con un mapa en blanco in Spanish). The book was published in November of that same year.
In 2018, 17 years afterLovers on All Saint's Day, Vásquez published his second collection of short stories,Songs for the Flames (Canciones para el incendio in Spanish). It was scheduled for publication in the UK in 2020.
