Interview with Juan Gabriel Vásquez in Kathimerini’s ‘K’ section.

Read below the exclusive interview given by Juan Gabriel Vásquez to Athos Dimoulas for the magazine K of Kathimerini, on the occasion of the release of his latest book The Shape of the Remains (translated by Achilleas Kyriakidis). It is 7.30 in the morning in Bogotá and Juan Gabriel Vásquez is sitting at his desk. This is how his daily routine begins. He writes until midday. In the afternoon, he reads, writes articles and spends time with his family. The 45-year-old author returned a few years ago to the Colombian capital and his hometown, after fifteen years in Europe. The Bogotá he had left behind, the Bogotá of his childhood and youth, was a city ravaged by the relentless war with the drug cartels. A terrifying and dangerous place, full of explosions, gunfire and despair. Is there a sense of security today? I ask him. Have the ghosts of the past gone? ‘Oh, ghosts never go away,’ he replies. His own generation, he believes, will carry the scars of that period forever, and no one will ever feel truly safe. Vazquez gained worldwide attention a few years ago with the multi-award-winning bestseller The Sound of Things Falling (published by Ikaros), transporting us to the era of Pablo Escobar’s omnipotence, when he had turned the country into a battlefield. Today he returns with *The Shape of Remains* (published by Ikaros, translated by Achilleas Kyriakidis), a voluminous and ambitious novel, dense and satisfying, in which he examines the nature of conspiracy theories and how they define our relationship with the truth. The narrator (who is the author himself) meets a very unusual man who believes that ‘they are hiding something from us’ regarding the assassination of the popular politician Jorge Eliezer Gaitán in 1948. What gives rise to conspiracy theories? ‘Human nature,’ replies Vázquez. ‘We understand the world and ourselves through stories; without stories to interpret our experiences, we are orphans, living in a void. So, whenever the official narrative fails to provide us with a convincing account of significant events, we fill in the gaps with our own invented stories. Of course, this also happens when the available accounts, though true, simply do not satisfy us.’ Through his book, as with his previous ones, Vásquez delves into the history of his homeland – I should mention that everything I know about Colombia I have learnt from Márquez’s books, from films about Escobar and from his own novels. Does the novelist have a responsibility to convey the truth? Or at least a truth? ‘A truth, more accurately. I wouldn’t write novels just to say exactly what anyone can find in history books or on Wikipedia. Literature explores a different kind of truth: in my novels I try to say (to use Kundera’s words) what only novels can say. With that in mind, yes, I want to help my readers understand the history of my country, the continent and modern life. At one point in the book, the narrator/author reads the comments following one of his articles in the digital edition of the newspaper El Espectador (Vásquez does indeed write for this particular newspaper), in which, he writes, ‘highlighted everything that afflicted my poor country: intellectual poverty, self-satisfied mediocrity, unpunished defamation, but also, above all, verbal terrorism, the schoolyard bullying to which the participants devoted themselves with unimaginable enthusiasm, the cowardice of those who hurled abuse under pseudonyms and would never repeat their insults out loud.” I ask him if he holds the same view regarding social media: “No, no, social media is even worse. I don’t have any kind of profile on them, and I believe that’s the best decision I’ve ever made. For a decade now, I’ve been saying that Facebook and Twitter are destroying political dialogue, hindering our democratic expression and undermining our freedoms rather than strengthening them.”  Today, Vázquez is one of the leading figures of this fascinating new generation of Latin American literature, which includes (to name but a few who have been translated into Greek) the Chilean Alejandro Sabra, the Peruvian Santiago Roncagliolo, the Argentine Andrés Neumann, the Mexican Jorge Volpi and, of course, many others. Vázquez believes that Latin American literature is experiencing a new golden age, but he says there is nothing that unites him with his fellow Latin American writers, in the way that their forebears were united by a common political stance regarding the Cuban crisis. Nor are they united by their writing style, although one commonality we might identify is that they have moved beyond the influence of magical realism, which (somewhat simplistically) came to be identified with the tradition of Latin American literature. Specifically, Vázquez has often remarked that the aura of the fantastical has created a false perception of his continent, in whose modern history there is nothing ‘magical’, but, on the contrary, there is a series of tragic events that literature must address with realism. He always makes a point of clarifying, however, that had he not read Márquez in his adolescence, he would never have become a writer. ‘Finding your own literary voice, especially when you come from a strong literary tradition, is by no means easy, but personally I never wanted to break away from that tradition,’ he says. “It would be foolish to want to run away from a language that gave birth to the stories of Borges, *One Hundred Years of Solitude* (by Márquez) and *The War of the End of the World* (by Llosa).”  Writing gamesA little writing trick, if I may call it that, or a routine, if you will, which Vazquez reveals during our conversation is this: he chooses a book and reads it alongside the novel he is currently writing. Thirty minutes of reading before he starts writing. It works, he tells me, like the tuner musicians use for their instruments. It tunes him in. Even if the book he is writing and the one he is reading have nothing to do with each other. For *The Shape of Remains*, he used *Crime and Punishment* as his ‘tuner’. Another ‘trick’ he employs is the one already mentioned: the narrator’s complete identification with himself. His protagonist is called Juan Gabriel Vásquez; he is a writer who lived in Europe, wrote a book called The Sound of Things Falling, returned to Colombia, and so on. As he explained to me, he chose this approach because many of the events he describes actually happened to him, and he felt that their impact would be diminished if he spent time constructing a fictional character. In other words, he did indeed meet (for those who have read the book) a doctor who had inherited the remains of a murdered politician, at precisely the time his twin daughters were being born. This identification with the narrator allowed him to express himself more freely in certain places regarding his role as a writer. At one point he writes that ‘the writer tries to bridge the gap between what he does not know and what he can learn’, and then describes how some books constitute a ‘struggle’ for the writer with the world and with himself, and then states: ‘One writes a book like the one I am writing now and has blind faith that the book might matter to someone else too.’ I ask him whether writing The Form of the Relics was indeed a struggle for him. “It was the biggest and hardest battle I’ve ever fought as a writer. It was an incredibly difficult novel to write, and I’m very proud of the result.” And rightly so. The Shape of the Remains is one of the most compelling and best-written novels of recent years. ■