Juan Gabriel Vásquez (born 1973) is a Colombian writer, journalist and translator. He has written many novels, short stories, literary essays, and numerous articles of political commentary.
His novel The Sound of Things Falling, published in Spanish in 2011, won the Alfaguara Novel Prize and the 2014 International 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 to Bogotá.
Biography and literary career Youth and studies in Bogotá Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in Bogotá in 1973, 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 the boom generation: Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, among others.
In 1990, Vásquez began studying Law at the Universidad 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 read Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, among other Latin American authors, and studied the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. He graduated in 1996 with a thesis entitled Revenge 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.
The Parisian period (1996–1998) Days after receiving his diploma, Vásquez traveled to Paris for post-graduate studies in Latin American literature at La 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, and James 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 of Virginia 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 publishing Alina 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.Hans Ulrich Obrist. Conversations in Colombia. Bogotá: La oficina del doctor, 2015.
The season in the Ardennes (1999) 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."Escribimos porque la realidad nos parece imperfecta: Entrevista con Jasper Vervaeke y Rita de Maeseneer". Ciberletras, 23 (2010).
His short story "The Messenger" was included in Líneas 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 as Joseph Conrad and Javier Marías, and also short story writers far from the Latin American tradition, like Chekhov and Alice Munro."Gracias, señora Munro". El Espectador, October 17, 2013. His experiences, encounters and observations during that season became the material of his next book, the collection of stories The 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.
The Barcelona years (1999–2012) In 2000, Vásquez began working as an editor at Lateral, 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 novelist Mathias Énard and Catalan cultural critic Jordi Carrión. The Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño was also connected to the magazine.
While working at Lateral, 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 to Raymond Carver and Jorge Luis Borges, critics were surprised by the fact that a Colombian author should write a book with Belgian or French characters.Miguel Silva. "Los amantes de Todos los Santos". Revista Gatopardo (June 2003). The few reviews that appeared in Spain praised the "subtleties of a Central European narrator"Xavi Ayén. "El colombiano Vásquez publica relatos de tono centroeuropeo". La Vanguardia, May 15, 2002. and discussed the simultaneous influence of Borges and Hemingway.Jordi Carrión. "Invitació a la lectura". Avui, September 3, 2001. From then on Vásquez would consider Lovers 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 of Hiroshima, by John Hersey. In 2002, after leaving Lateral, he concentrated on translation and journalism as ways to earn a living. He wrote articles and book reviews for El Periódico de Catalunya and El País, among others. He translated Victor Hugo’s Last Day of a Condemned Man and John Dos Passos’ Journeys Between Wars. In 2003, Vásquez published Nowhere Man (El hombre de ninguna parte), a brief biography of Joseph 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 by Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos 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.Maya Jaggi. "A Life in Writing: Juan Gabriel Vásquez". The Guardian, June 25, 2010. In England, where it was endorsed by John 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. In The New York Times, Larry Rohter wrote: "Vasquez's career takes off remarkably."Larry Rohter. "In 1940s Colombia, Blacklists and 'Enemy Aliens'". The New York Times, August 2, 2009. Jonathan Yardley, in The Washington Post, said it was "the best work of literary fiction to come my way since 2005".Jonathan Yardley. 'Jonathan Yardley reviews "The Informers" by Juan Gabriel Vásquez'. The Washington Post, August 2, 2009. The novel was translated by Anne 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 novel Nostromo, and with the Colombian history of the 19th century, especially the building of the Panama Canal. His narrator has a picaresque and sarcastic tone, constantly addressing the reader, having recourse to anachronisms, exaggerations, and improbability whenever it suits his yarn. According to Spanish novelists Juan Marsé and Enrique 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 of Gabriel 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.Juan Gabriel Vásquez. "La vieja pregunta". El Espectador, March 20, 2014.In 2007, Vásquez was included in Bogotá 39, a Hay Festival project that brought together the most notable Latin American writers under 39 years of age. That same year he began writing opinion pieces for El Espectador, the most prominent liberal Colombian newspaper. In his columns he was deeply critical of the governments of Álvaro Uribe in Colombia and Hugo 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."Creo en la novela como manera de dialogar con el mundo: Entrevista con Jasper Vervaeke". In Jasper Vervaeke, Juan Gabriel Vásquez: la distorsión deliberada. Antwerp: University of Antwerp, 2015.In 2008, Vásquez published a compilation of literary essays entitled The Art of Distortion (El arte de la distorsión in Spanish). That same year, he was invited to the Santa Maddalena Foundation, a retreat for writers located in Tuscany, Italy. There he began writing his novel The Sound of Things Falling.