Looking back

Colombia, 2009. The narrator of the story, the young law lecturer Antonio Yamarra, reads in a magazine about the killing of a hippopotamus that had escaped from the zoo owned by the notorious Pablo Escobar. The article takes him back to the mid-1990s, when the Colombian government’s war with Escobar’s cocaine cartel was raging in the streets, forests and skies of Colombia. At that time, Yamarra meets a solitary billiards player, a ‘former pilot’ by his own account, whose murder propels the narrator into a quest to unravel the mystery, but also into a process of redefining his own identity and his relationships with his people. His investigations will take him back to the turbulent 1960s that changed the world, just before the drug trade trapped an entire generation in a living nightmare, in a cycle of violence and fear.

When journalist Gabriel Santoro published his first book, a biography of a German woman who settled in Colombia shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, he could not have imagined that the most scathing review would be written by his own father. What lay behind the German woman’s seemingly innocuous confessions? What was it that made Santoro’s father feel betrayed? The book chronicles the young journalist’s quest to uncover the truth, however bitter it may ultimately be, travelling back in time until he reaches that terrible decade of the 1940s, when lives were destroyed, families torn apart and consciences sullied in Colombia.

‘Conspiracy theories are like climbing plants, Basques: they cling to anything to get higher, and they keep climbing until you take away what’s supporting them.’ In 2014, Carlos Carvajo was arrested in a museum in Bogotá for the theft of the cloth suit belonging to Jorge Eliezer Gaitán, the liberal political leader who was assassinated in 1948. Haunted by these mysteries of the past, Carvaggio is constantly searching for clues that will give meaning to his quest. Yet no one, not even those closest to him, can fathom the deeper reasons behind his obsession. What links the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Jorge Eliezer Gaitán, whose death shaped the history of Colombia? How can a crime that took place in 1914—that of the leader of the Liberal Party, Rafael Uribe Uribe—mark the life of a man in the 21st century? For Carvaggio, everything is connected and there are no coincidences. Juan Gabriel Vásquez, as the narrator and central character of the novel, decides to delve into the secrets of the darkest aspects of Colombia’s past. By recounting the story of a crime, the author manages to shed light on a collective illusion, to show us that the novel seeks to reveal nothing other than what we truly are. Arturo García Ramos, ABC

Javier Mayarino is a living legend. He is the most influential political cartoonist in the country, a man who can bring about the withdrawal of a law, the overturning of a court ruling or the dismissal of a mayor, or seriously shake the foundations of a ministry — and all this with nothing but paper and Indian ink as his weapons. Politicians fear him and the government honours him. At sixty-five, after four decades of a brilliant career, he can say he has the country at his feet. Everything will change, however, when a young woman pays him an unexpected visit. Together they will recall some painful memories, which will force Mayarino to re-evaluate his entire life and question his place in this world. In the demanding genre of the novella, which has given Latin American literature so many significant works, Vázquez offers us a book about encounters that are not quite so random, which may forever change what we believe about ourselves.

A photographer, in pursuit of the truth, realises something she would rather ignore. A Korean War veteran is confronted with his past during a meeting that initially seemed harmless. The narrator, working as an extra on the set of a Polanski film, observes the director’s face, searching for signs in the aftermath of the Sharon Tate murders. An online search for a book published in 1887 leads a writer to discover the life of a passionate woman. The characters in the book are men and women who have suffered violence directly or indirectly, and whose lives are completely transformed by a chance encounter or the workings of incomprehensible forces. ‘A great book. Nine moments from the past that resist oblivion. [...] A coherent, episodic, almost perfect book.’ ―El Cultural

‘…he thought that memories are invisible like light, and just as smoke made the light visible, there must be some way to make memories visible too.’ In October 2016, Colombian director Sergio Cabrera, attending a retrospective of his films in Barcelona, is facing a difficult personal moment: his father has just died, his marriage is in crisis, the people of Colombia have rejected the peace agreements that would have paved the way for an end to a fifty-year bloody civil war, and all this prompts him to mentally retrace the journey of three generations of his family. From the Spanish Civil War to his grandfather’s self-imposed exile in Latin America, and from the Chinese Cultural Revolution to the armed guerrilla movements of the 1970s, the reader will discover a life of adventure spanning half a century. Looking Back is a gripping narrative and, at the same time, a profound socio-political study. In the hands of a masterful novelist such as Vásquez, the simple recounting of true events is transformed into a dark portrait of a family caught up in the maelstrom of history. Juan Gabriel Vásquez has reinvented Latin American literature in the 21st century. ―Jonathan Franzen [Read what Achilleas Kyriakidis wrote on our blog about the translation of the book.](https://ikarosbooks.gr/blog/o-achilleas-kiriakidis-gia-ti-metafrasi-tou-girizontas-to-vlemma-piso-tou-neou-mithistorimatos-tou-juan-gabriel-vasquez)

In October and November 2022, Juan Gabriel Vázquez was invited to give lectures at the prestigious Weidenfeld Chair of Comparative European Literature at the University of Oxford, which, in the past, had hosted Mario Vargas Llosa, George Steiner, Umberto Eco, Javier Cercas and Ali Smith. In the four presentations collected in this book, Vazquez explores whether literary fiction constitutes a way of understanding life that is not found in any other field of knowledge or creativity; whether literature can translate, interpret and, consequently, illuminate the world; whether it possesses the unique ability to clarify the complexity of human experience – the mystery of every life, our connection to the past, our fraught relationship with politics – and to transform this interpretation into knowledge. Essays that ask us to redefine the role of fiction, our understanding of its mechanisms and the reasons why it is more essential than ever, and, at the same time, demonstrate the great intellectual stature and mastery of the award-winning author. An exceptionally gifted writer [...]. One of the leading figures in Spanish literature ―Le Figaro

On 8 January 1982, the Colombian sculptor Felisa Burstein dies suddenly in a Paris restaurant. At the time of her death, she is accompanied by her husband and four friends. One of them, the writer Gabriel García Márquez, published an article a few days later containing three seemingly simple yet painfully enigmatic words: ‘She died of grief’. Award-winning author Juan Gabriel Vásquez uses this phrase as a starting point to explore the unknown story of this important writer, who lived her entire life with the revolutionary desire to be her own master. _In the book ‘The Names of Felisa’, Vázquez masterfully combines biography, reality and imagination to craft a heart-rending narrative about how personal life is inevitably crushed by the forces of politics and history._ [Read what Achilleas Kyriakidis wrote on our blog about the translation of the book.](https://ikarosbooks.gr/blog/achilleas-kiriakidis-metafrazontas-ta-onomata-tis-felisas-tou-juan-gabriel-vasquez)