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the complete review - fiction

The Informers

by
Juan Gabriel Vásquez

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : decent take on betrayal that ties itself into a few too many knots

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Many, though not all, very impressed -- and everyone grants that he can write well

  From the Reviews:

• "Vásquez’s great theme is memory: the nightmares, personal and political, that return to haunt us. But unlike Bolaño’s stolid, serviceable prose, Vásquez’s style is musical, occasionally even lush, and its poeticism remains unmuddled in McLean’s translation." - Matthew Shaer, Bookforum
  
  
• "In the case of Vásquez, his debut novel, The Informers, is unlike anything written by his Latin American contemporaries. If there is any prevailing influence in this chilling work it is the late German writer, WG Sebald. (...) Vásquez offers no certitudes. His complex novel is discomfiting because it suggests that every one of us could be ethically compromised, given the wrong set of circumstances. More damningly, it tells us, making amends is impossible." - Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times
  
  
• "Die immer kleiner werdenden Schachteln, in die Vásquez’ Story zurückweicht, muss man hier nicht aufzählen, doch der schöne Effekt soll benannt sein: Es ist wie die Suche nach einem Gespenst, das den Erzähler in verschiedene Räume, verschiedene Zeiten, verschiedene Bewusstseinswelten lockt." - Paul Ingendaay, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "Vásquez shows a mastery of technique and language. The examination of the consequences that a single act can have not only for the person committing it but also, through the ripple effect, for many others brings us into the territory of Ian McEwan's Atonement. The novel may not have the fireworks of magical realism, but its sure construction of narrative and vivid portrayal of a wide array of characters build an extraordinary tale, one which reminds the reader that any novel can be a fascinating mixture of magic and realism." - Nick Caistor, The Guardian
  
  
• "Anne McLean's translation captures every shifting tone in the novel's silvery palette." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
  
  
• "The translator, Anne McLean, successfully re-creates the fluid and, at times, colloquial Latin American tone of the original Spanish text, dexterously ensuring our immediate familiarity with its rich cast of sharply observed characters. Yet at times The Informers makes for frustrating reading: its plot is enigmatic and the narrator seldom trustworthy, while the style is so indirect as to become unnecessarily confusing. The reward for perseverance is not complete clarity, but at least a degree of understanding." - Tom Gaisford, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "At its best, The Informers is chilling, but often it is merely chilly. The younger Santoro, who has "never known where friendship stops and reporting starts," is strangely bloodless. He is an instrument of his story, a receiver and inventor of histories -- an informer, and a good one, but not a fully realized character. (...) Vásquez is a hugely skilled writer, his prose weighted with authority and carefully observed detail, and he is a dexterous weaver of voices and time periods. The Informers fares best when he allows his protagonist to stay in the moment, to build scenes instead of imagining wide swaths of the past." - Adam Mansbach, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Juan Gabriel Vásquez gelingt es, aus einer relativ überschaubaren Szenerie eine Geschichte zu entwickeln, die weit über sich hinausweist, die an eine Vergangenheit erinnert, die in Lateinamerika vergleichsweise unbekannt ist. Vor allem aber demonstriert er einen Geschichtssinn, der in den letzten Jahren in der zeitgenössischen lateinamerikanischen Literatur eher selten geworden ist. Die drängenden sozialen Probleme der Gegenwart, allen voran die kaum zu bändigende Gewalt in manchen Ländern des Kontinents, haben zu einer literarischen Hingabe an die Gegenwart geführt, wie sie in der Summe der Werke ermüdender nicht sein könnte." - Kersten Knipp, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
  
  
• "In sharp contrast to Mr. García Márquez’s levitating priests and very old men with enormous wings, The Informers is a straight-ahead, old-fashioned narrative, though not necessarily linear. Mr. Vásquez moves back and forth between the 1980s and ’90s and the 1930s and ’40s, but shows restraint, addressing history rather than myth. He avoids unnecessary pyrotechnics, perhaps out of respect for the gravity of his subject. If anything, he would seem to owe a debt to Joseph Conrad, of whom he has recently written a biography, and Borges." - Larry Rohter, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "This isn’t Greek tragedy; this is modern tragedy. (...) At times the novel reads like an existential text. Its concern with the tension between word and deed (the father’s interest in rhetoric is reflected in the novel’s obsession with the spoken word) eventually explodes into a realisation that word is deed." - William Brett, The Spectator
  
  
• "The structure of the novel is complex, and summarising it here does not do it justice. This is a subtle book about the ways in which the past can inform and shape the present. More fundamentally, it is a moving study of betrayal." - Alastair Sooke, The Telegraph
  
  
• "It is a novel about many things, all of them interesting and explored by Vásquez with acute moral sensitivity, but at its core is one of the greatest of all literary themes: betrayal. (...) Nothing works out quite the way anyone expects, which is just one of the many strengths of this remarkable novel. It deals with big universal themes -- betrayal, the war between fathers and sons, cowardice and valor -- and big particular ones: the mix of peoples and histories that is Latin America, the painful political and social history under which Colombia suffers, the poison that Nazism spread throughout the world. It is the best work of literary fiction to come my way since 2005" - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
  
  
• "Und das Merkwürdigste an diesem Buch ist, dass Juan Gabriel Vásquez keinen einzigen moralischen Triumph exekutiert. Seine sanfte, raffiniert-komplexe Aufklärungsarbeit ist wirkungsvoll -- und radikal." - Verena Auffermann, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Informers is narrated by Gabriel Santoro, who shares his father's name. Several years earlier, in 1988, the younger Santoro had published a book called A Life in Exile, about the life of a Jewish woman -- a family friend -- who had come to Colombia from Germany as a girl before World War II. The elder Santoro did not take well to the book:

This book is an attack on me, no more, no less, an attempted homicide.

On its own merits, A Life in Exile would have gone unnoticed; my father -- or rather his disproportionate, impetuous, unthinking reaction -- took care of putting the book center stage and focusing all spotlights on it.

The whole book seemed like a giant trail leading to him, pointing at him. Every time the Hotel Sabaneta is mentioned, he felt incriminated, discovered. Every time the blacklists are discussed in the book, lives damaged or simply affected by the lists, he felt the same.

If it was about revising his history, my father -- my revisionist father -- had achieved it with success. But then, he'd committed the error that we all perhaps commit: telling secrets after sex.

Later in books we see the important things. But by the time we see them it is already too late. That's the trouble, Gabriel, forgive my frankness, but that's the fucking trouble with books.

- M.A.Orthofer, 23 September 2009

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Links:

• Bloomsbury publicity page
• Riverhead publicity page
• Editorial Alfaguara publicity page
• Schöffling publicity page
• Profile in The Guardian

• Bookforum
• Chamber Four
• Deutschlandradio (German)
• dovegreyreader scribbles
• 1streading's Blog
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• Frankfurter Rundschau (German)
• Glanz & Elend (German)
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• Independent on Sunday
• The L Magazine
• The Latin American Review of Books
• The Los Angeles Times
• Le Monde diplomatique (French)
• The Nervous Breakdown
• Neue Zürcher Zeitung (German)
• Página/12 (Spanish)
• El País (Spanish)
• Paste
• A Progressive on the Prairie
• Quarterly Conversation
• Ready when you are, C.B.
• Sandammeer (German)
• To be read ...
• Two Weeks Notice
• Valet Reader
• Vol.1 Brooklyn
• The Washington Post
• Die Zeit (German)

• [The Secret History of Costaguana]

• See Index of Latin and South American literature

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About the Author:

       Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in 1973.

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© 2009-2021 the complete review

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