Review: "The Shape of the Ruins" by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Even after finishing it almost six years ago, the power of Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s breakthrough novel The Sound of Things Falling is still eerily present to me. Reading like Bolano by way of Auster, it plums the dark heart of a country that has always seemed to been in some kind of turmoil, always on the verge of an upheaval that threatens to uproot the nation and its values and swallow its citizens whole. It is a terrifying prospect and in the hands of Vasquez (and his brilliant translator Anne McLean) the terrible reality is laid bare at our feet with eloquence and grandeur. Even though his two novels before, The Informers and The Secret History of Costaguana and one after, the slim Reputations failed to live up to his breakthrough’s lofty expectations (his short story collection, Lover’s on All Saints’ Day came close), he remains one of my favorite international writers. His most recent translation, The Shape of the Ruins, was a welcome surprise early in 2019, and while I’m hesitant to say it is better than The Sound of Things Falling, it comes pretty close. At his 509 pages, it is his longest to date and with its length it feels like a bit of a summation of certain themes Vasquez has wrestled with throughout his books, such as the unbearable weight history exudes on its victims, the helplessness in the face of a brutal, sometimes omnipresent oppressive power and the hidden mechanisms behind history’s more violent episodes. At the center of the novel is a fictionalized (maybe) version of Vasquez himself, a device I usually find irritating, but here, his presence is never cloying and adds to the creeping dread of the story. It begins with news story of a seemingly innocuous crime; a man has broken into a museum and used a pair of brass knuckles to break the display of a suit that was worn by famous Columbian politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitan when he was assassinated. But the man is Carlos Carbello, and how Vasquez knows the man is at the book’s dark heart. Vasquez first met him at a party thrown by one of his doctor friends in the midst of dealing with his twin daughter’s premature birth, a meeting that ends with Vasquez breaking Carlos’s nose. But somehow, over the next ten years, through a strange set of coincidences involving a historical artifact related to the assassination of Gaitan, a late night conspiracy radio show and the tragic details of Carlo’s own life, Vasquez finds himself entranced by the unwritten, hidden details of two Columbian assassinations in the 20^th century. The details of the second assassination, that of General Uribe in 1914 takes up a bulk of the book’s tail end, and it is easy to find parallels between the young Azula, whose doomed quest to uncover the truth of the General assassination and that of Carlos, whose connection to the assassination of Gaitain in 1948 seemingly dooms him to be obsessed with it. Like the crimes at its center, the book has no real resolution, leaving the reader intrigued and disquieted by mystery’s destined to never be solved and those destined to search for impossible answers. 

Rating: 5/5