After spending 20 years relentlessly probing the violent past of Colombia, that of yesterday and today, the writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez thinks he is still far from having exhausted his subject.
On May 7, the Colombian will receive for all of his work the 10and Metropolis Azul award. Awarded as part of the Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal, it rewards the author of a literary work written in Spanish, French or English that deals with Hispanic culture or history.
“Being Colombian means taking on your back a story of pain, suffering and violence that doesn’t let go, that you feel compelled to try to understand. It’s like a kind of curse,” says Juan Gabriel Vásquez in his excellent French. A very complicated country, which he still does not manage to understand, admits the writer that The duty interviewed in Austria, before his visit to Montreal.
Born in Bogotá in 1973 into a family of Anglophile lawyers, the author of songs for the fire (Seuil, 2021) recounts having been marked both by the generation of the Latin American boom (García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes) and by that of the English language of the interwar period (Joyce, Hemingway or Faulkner) .
“They had in common the fact of having passed through Paris, an almost symbolic place. And when I had the revelation that I wanted to become a writer, I too decided to go to Paris. Like a big Latin American cliché,” he explains with a laugh. It was therefore with continuity in his ideas that he landed in Paris in 1996 to study at the Sorbonne, where he spent three years.
What to see in Blue Metropolis
“Paris, like many cities in the world, can be very cruel, continues Juan Gabriel Vásquez. It’s a city that embraces you if you’re successful, but is very hostile if you’re failing. And I think I was failing. In the sense that I couldn’t write what I wanted to write. After having published his first books – two novels which he rejects today – he says that he then left Paris to go “hide” with friends in Belgium, before getting married and going to live in Barcelona, where his career “started again” in 2001, with All Saints lovers (Threshold, 2011).
After 16 years in Europe, the writer returned to live in Colombia in 2012. A long expatriation that changed his way of seeing his country, recognizes the writer. “I have always believed that it was the remoteness, both geographical and spiritual, that allowed me to write about my country, offering me a certain perspective and allowing me to escape the immediate facts. The Colombian reality is very heavy, it weighs on you. And the distance allowed me to sort of examine that reality with an irony, let’s say, that also brings a novelist’s understanding. »
Telling the invisible reality
In his eyes, fiction makes it possible to say what history or journalism cannot express. “They bring us a narrative that is the first ladder to understand reality. But there is also an invisible side, an emotional or psychological side, sometimes moral, historical and social elements that cannot be reached otherwise. The novel makes it possible to tell the hidden side of visible reality, thinks Vásquez.
“I often say that if you want to know the facts of the Napoleonic wars, he adds, you read history books, but if you want to know how people lived through the Napoleonic wars, you read War and peace of Tolstoy. The two together give us the full understanding of a historical moment. »
With novels like The noise falling things Where reputations (Seuil, 2012 and 2014), Juan Gabriel Vásquez explores with strength and finesse the territory of lies and half-truths of this divided country where peace still seems far away.
The narrator of body of ruins (Seuil, 2017) says that Colombia is the “land of death”. Is that the case ? “I think that’s a question I’ve tried to answer in all my books. Why this talent of Colombian violence to reproduce itself, to reinvent itself? My experience as a Colombian citizen is inseparable from a violence that has several different origins: that of the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, that which is linked to drugs. The same question has bothered Colombian writers since the beginning of the 20th century.and century. »
And if the literature, of course, does not provide answers or solutions, it makes it possible to discover the hidden mechanisms and to “find the most accurate questions”. “That’s what you can find in A hundred years of lonelinessas well as in a later novel like The army, by Evelio Rosero,” he points out. Novels that try to highlight an aspect of Colombian violence, with the hope, perhaps, of shedding light on the deep mechanisms of the fratricidal violence that has afflicted this South American country for too long.
A Latin American who writes like an Anglo-Saxon
For Isabelle Gugnon, his translator in French (and some big names like Manuel Vilas, Rodrigo Fresán or Antonio Muñoz Molina), Juan Gabriel Vásquez is a Latin American who writes like an Anglo-Saxon. “He is clearly the heir of great Anglo-Saxon writers like Henry James or Joseph Conrad, she believes, even if he also claims to be a lot of Mario Vargas Llosa. He really is a storyteller. And it is this distortion of reality through the prism of fiction that makes him an immense writer for me. »
If truth and fiction form a faithful couple with complex relationships in his work, it is perhaps a reflection of the reality of Colombia itself. In Secret history of Costaguana, a protagonist asserts that “Colombians are all liars” — which would perhaps give a head start to the novelists of this country. “Power, political and religious forces are always narrative forces in our countries that try to impose a certain version of reality, past or present. And literature is often the place where, as citizens, we raise our hands and say: it wasn’t like that, you’re lying, I have another version. Literature tries to give people back the right to their own version. »
It is sometimes said that happy people have no history. Are violence, evil, scars and secrets the seeds of better literature? “I believe that happy societies have no literature,” dares Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Societies in conflict, in convulsion, produce novels because the novel is the place where the discontents of a society, the frustrations, are filtered. This is where the desire to tell stories or to defend values that reality forbids is expressed. »
In addition to the Metropolis Azul Lifetime Achievement Award Ceremony (Saturday, May 7, 9 p.m.),
Juan Gabriel Vásquez will participate in French in a round table entitled “Physical violence and the novel: how to write it? », with Myriam Vincent, Dimitri Rouchon-Borie and Perrine Leblanc (Sunday, May 8, 12 p.m., $7).