3.5 stars

Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge 2017

Task #4 Read a book set in Central or South America, written by a Central or South American author.

3.5

Engrossing novel about memory, and the corruption of an entire generation of Colombians who grew up inured to the daily senseless violence of the Escobar years. A very quick read, with my ability to form an opinion no doubt stunted by my lack of cultural reference in this case. The writing (in translation) has moments of beauty and a subtle humor, but ultimately this is a story of loss: the loss of a life, the loss of direction, and the loss of memory (a memory built on a falsehood, with nothing to replace it). I found it difficult to relate to the narrator, if only because he displays flaws which I can too easily identify in myself, and perhaps also because, for a character with such insight into the state of his generation, he has remarkable difficulty placing himself within it. For all his talk about how the Escobar years impacted "our generation," he shows clearly by the end that he learned the lesson far to late to save himself.

Well, I wanted to like this. I really really really wanted to like it. But I’ve never picked it up for some reason. Until now. So I took it on holiday with me, and I thought, let’s see, I can get down by the pool, or on the beach and just gorge on it.

Only I didn’t. I put it down at every opportunity, I used any excuse to stop after a few pages, a few paragraphs, a few lines.

I’m not entirely sure I can say why. I know I struggled with the narrator, Antonio Yammara. I didn’t like him at all, and yet I guess being shot for seemingly no reason at all can make a person like that, I literally have no concept of what that is like. But I’m not sure that was it, I’ve had characters I’ve not liked before (I’ve been trying to think if I’ve had narrators I didn’t like before) so not sure why Yammara should be any different. But coupled with Vasquez’s prose, it just left me cold. While I normally make notes as I read I had nothing for this, by the end I felt like I was powering through it just to finish.

And yet I’m not sure it was the prose alone. I actually enjoyed the story of Ricardo Laverde, and that made the book seem alive, but as soon as it switched back to Yammara I switched off. It’s a shame because it paints a poignant picture of Colombia before and during the reign of cocaine that has terrorised the population for so long, and indeed Yammara’s fascination with Laverde is tied in his desire to understand what happened, and why it happened, why he has become what he has become. Strangely I wanted it to end differently. I could understand why Aura did what she did, yet at the same time in my head I accused of her of not being supportive and understanding, which, perhaps is an accusation that I can point to myself.

I will try another Juan Gabriel Vásquez book, I want to find some new Latin American authors that I can read with the same joy as Garcia Marquez, Jorge Amado, Vargas Llosa and others, hopefully Vásquez can still be that.
(blog review here)

I liked this book even though I wasn't really supposed to. That is, it's (loosely) a story about drugs and drug trafficking, which are usually too stressful and annoying for me, and it features a male protagonist who is sometimes a jerk to the women in his life. But the story is intriguing enough to make up for the drugs and the jerkiness, and the writing is lovely. Unfortunately I sent it back to the library without copying out the line I meant to save, but that will give me a good reason to read it again.

I was tremendously bored by this book, which probably means there was some underlying message or theme that wasn't penetrating my thick skull.

For someone knowledgeable or interested in Colombian history or Pablo Escobar's end, this could be an interesting angle from which to view it.

Un libro bien construido, con un buen final, pero que le falta un poco de contexto y sentido a la historia.