Maybe because The Informers
is Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s first “real” novel (he published a few before, but he
doesn’t consider them readable), but this is quite a step down from the sucker
punch of his most recent novel, The Sound of Things Falling. That novel came
out of nowhere, and was easily in the top five books I read last year. It is
both a chilling and emotional journey into loss and the ever-present
encompassing evil that has, unfortunately, made its way into the collective
conscious of an entire country. It might be that this novel is a bit more
personal in the themes that Vasquez expanded upon in The Sound of Things
Falling, but reading through this novel, which is about 75 pages longer, it
lacked an emotional core that was easily accessible for me to latch onto,
making some of the politics it discusses a bit overwhelming. The novel deals
with a writer, Gabriel Santoro, who publishes a book that his father, Gabriel
Sr., a famous professor, destroys in a review. Afterwards, their relationship
is strained, until Gabriel Sr. dies in a bus accident. Once he begins to
investigate his death, and the more clues come out surrounding the nature of
it, Gabriel uncovers a much darker secret between the book that he wrote, about
family friend Sara Guterman, and the reasons for his father’s hatred of it;
reasons that involve guilt over a betrayal, and the implications it had on the future.
I still think this novel is okay. It has a great mood throughout, a kind of
dank, inescapable loneliness that lies hidden on almost every page, but the
affect that the tragedy has lies strictly within a small group instead of
innocent bystanders, making the horror that Vasquez is so good at engineering
less potent. If you haven’t checked out Vasquez’s work yet, you should do so;
this is an imperfect novel, but still pretty damn good.
Rating: 4/5
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