11 Aug / Songs for the Flames by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, translated by Anne McLean [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
Prodigious author, journalist, and translator Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Reputations, 2016), one of South America’s most important writers, is once again deftly translated by award-winning Canadian Anne McLean.
Four stories provokingly manipulate time. In “Woman on the Riverbank,” a war photographer briefly encounters a politician’s assistant at a remote ranch and again 20 years later. Death separates teen BFFs in “The Double” until the surviving friend is scathingly confronted by his late friend’s aging father after achieving literary success. “Frogs” presents a deserter posing as a veteran who recognizes a woman who paid for his help decades prior. “Bad News” reveals a Colombian expat in Paris who listens to an American’s story only to learn a different truth nine years later.
Families can’t save their own in “Us” when a missing Colombian commits suicide in Florida, and in “The Last Corrido,” featuring an L.A. band’s founding member who performs his final tour. Violence haunts “Airport,” in which a Colombian writer in Paris is cast as an extra in Roman Polanski’s Ninth Gate, and “The Boys,” about teens who create a power structure with their fists. The titular “Songs for the Flames” – the best for last – traces the harrowing life and death of a rule-breaking, French-born Colombian woman.
Disturbing yet necessary, Vásquez’s fiction becomes enduring testimony.
Review: “Fiction,” Booklist, July 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2020 (Colombia), 2021 (United States)