Juan Gabriel Vsquez

by Silvana Paternostro

Photo by Peter Drubin. Courtesy of Riverhead Books.

Colombian fiction writers today have to confront two shadows when facing the blank page:
the culture of drug-trafficking and the legacy of Garca Mrquezs magical realism. Juan
Gabriel Vsquez has managed to dodge both in his last two novels. I became aware of him
when he published Historia secreta de Costaguana (Secret history of Costaguana) in 2007.
By using Joseph Conrads fictive South American country in the title, Vsquez was
distancing himself from the omnipresent tropes confining Colombian men of letters. I heard
of Vsquez again this past summer, when an earlier novel of his, The Informers, appeared in
English translation.
The Informers is about Colombias German and Jewish migr populationsat times the two
convergedduring World War II. By telling the story of Sara Gutterman, a German Jew who
arrived in the country in the late 1930s, it unveils a secret past, one of the many unresolved
stories of Colombias collective memory. A law passed by President Eduardo Santos in
support of the Allied forces called for Nazi sympathizers to be imprisoned and for their
property to be confiscated. Listening to Wagner or speaking German was considered enough
evidence for someone to be sent to a mountain prison retreat. People were encouraged to
be vigilant and inform on friends and family, and, predictably, a witch hunt not unlike

McCarthyism ensued. The novel is told in the voice of a writer who discovers that his very
father was one of such informants, but to say more would be to give the plot away.
Reading The Informers is like peeling an onion, removing layer after layer, each one
revealing the complexity of the human condition and tracing surprising historical parallels.
The similarities, for instance, between the lootings of Kristallnacht and those during
Colombias Bogotazothe assassination of the populist leader Jorge Elicer Gaitn in 1948
that marked the beginning of the gruesome period of La Violenciaare impressively woven
together. Carlos Fuentes has written that this novel offers the reader that gray area of human
actions and awareness where our capacity to make mistakes, betray, and conceal creates a
chain reaction that condemns us to a world without satisfaction. I agree, yet in
The Informers there is also a place for forgiveness.
Last October, I sat with Vsquez in a conference room at his publishers office in New York
to talk about his books; inevitably, we lamented Colombias unending violence. In such a
neutral, nondescript room, Colombia felt as unreal as Joseph Conrads fictional Costaguana.
In our conversation, as in life, fiction and politics converged: storytelling, like the one he
masterfully displays in The Informers, is a peace offering.
Silvana Paternostro Up until The Informers there was no book about the Jewish community
in Colombia.
Juan Gabriel Vsquez There were some books, sure, but no novels about these events. Not
only the Jewish community, but the blacklisted Germans, the reclusion of enemy citizens. We
novelists are terribly conceited, you know. We think the world is incomplete until it has been
explored in a novel.
SP There used to be a Pastelera Alemana (a German bakery) in Barranquilla when I was
growing up. As I was reading your book I saw myself in that dimly lit bakery that women
with an accent ran from their house. Id walk into it and immediately feel I was no longer in
Colombiatheir pastries smelled different. I hadnt put together Nazism and the Pastelera
Alemana before. Like so much about our countrys history, that all Germans were suspect
and victims of a witch hunt had totally eluded me.
JGV People dont like to remember those days. When the Colombian government decided to
actively participate in World War II as an Ally against the Axis, one of the first measures it
took was to protect coasts and borders. German, Italian, and Japanese citizens were removed
from those areas. Barranquilla, being the most important port on the Atlantic, had a huge
immigrant population. Imagine all those people having to move from their homes to the
interior, after decades of having lived there, all because their passports said they came from
certain places.
SP Isnt it interesting that reading fiction is the best way to understand history? Now I
wonder if the bakery owners werent informed upon by their neighbors, and if that wasnt the

reason why they kept strange hours and their lights were mostly off. Of course my memories
are from the late 70s and not from the 40s, when one of the narratives in your book takes
place.
JGV Barranquilla comes into play in another waythe Colombian Nazi Party was based
there. Journalists Silvia Galvis and Alberto Donadio have found amazing photographs of
their sessions, with all those swastikas and German flags and lifted arms in the middle of the
Caribbean coast. For a novelist, theyre an incredible sight. They also prove that the
governments reaction was not paranoidthere was cause for concern. Thats why the
situation described in The Informers was interesting to me, because it falls into a gray area.
SP The Informers pulled back a curtain for me. I didnt have many friends with Germansounding last names in Barranquilla; the ones that did must have gone to the German School.
Instead, I had many Jewish classmates at the American School. My best friend in elementary
school was a Jewish girl named Debbie Schwartzher Shirley Temple curls and freckles and
blue eyes fascinated me, but it was her household that intrigued me. Why didnt they have a
Christmas tree and a nativity scene in December? Her parents spoke with accents and going
to her house was like going on a trip to a different, better city.
You and I both left Colombia. You went to Paris. Did you decide you wanted to be a writer
before you left?
JGV The decision came halfway through my law studies. I began flirting with fictionor, as
R. L. Stevenson says in a poem, playing with paperthrough writing a shameless
imitation ofOne Hundred Years of Solitude. Taking something you know well and doing it all
over again is a great way to learn how paragraphs and sentences work. One day I began to
copy, word for word, Joyces The Dead and Borgess The Circular Ruins. I did this
because Id started writing my own stories. Id been writing for a long time, but these stories
were the first written toward publication. Id become utterly uninterested in anything that
was not about mastering the art of storytelling.
SP Did you confess that to anybody?
JGV I told my family that I had absolutely no intention of working as a lawyer after
graduating from law school. I had discovered what I wanted to do and didnt think of writing
as a weekend activity, a thing on the side.
SP Had you written in secret, a escondidas, before?
JGV I wrote my first short story when I was eight; it won this school prize. I dont think
theres been a period in my life when I wasnt writing.
SP Whats the story about? But first tell me how your father reacted to the news; did he want
you to follow a family tradition?

JGV I wish I had some Kafkaesque stories about the clash between my family and my
mtier, but I dont. After all, they had been feeding me novels forever. At one point in my life
soccer was all that interested me. The World Cup in Spain was approaching, so it must have
been 1981. My father gave me this slim biography of Pel, the Brazilian player, in English.
He wanted to read the book in Spanish, and asked if I would translate it for a small fee. I did.
I now understand what he was doing: he managed to nourish my relationship with books and
the English language. I had a great time and earned some side money.
About the story . . . Strangely, it foreshadows the major themes of most of my fiction. Not to
draw cheap psychological conclusions from this, but I cant help noticing it. Its the story of a
small boy who gets trapped by accident in this ship thats going to London: he gets lost in the
city, buys a hot dog, and finds his way back to Colombia; everything in a page and a half.
SP So at eight you were already fantasizing about leaving. We Colombians have always had
such a sense of inferiorityor is it curiosity, a sense of adventure? For us in Barranquilla,
Miami is better. For you in Bogot, its London. In The Informers, the protagonist, who is
provincial, really values Sara Gutterman and Enrique Deressers European backgrounds. Is
this related to our fascination with the outside world?
JGV Bogot is no different than any other third-world capital; that fascination with the
metropolis is something you will find everywhere, from Naipauls Trinidad to Careys
Australia. I dont think it comes from an inferiority complex, which, in any case, would be
the reason why people dont leave. Anyway, Colombia is special in that it has two coasts and
its capital is inland. Caracas is a coastal city. So are Lima, Santiago, and Buenos Aires.
Before airplanes, it took anywhere between five days and two weeks to get from Barranquilla
to Bogot. Bogot was a hidden city and I think the cultural elite felt the need to go and look
for the world; otherwise they would die of provincialism and boredom.
SP People wear more tweed in Bogot than in London, and theres Victorian and Tudor
architecture all over the city.
JGV An uncle of mine lived in London for some years during the 50s, and, during that time,
he took my father, barely an adolescent, to spend three years or so at a boarding school near
London. Since then my father developed an incurable Anglophilia that I seem to have
inherited. Anyway, my uncle was one of those people you talk about, with his hat and his
gloves and his cane. All that has disappeared, obviously, not only because times have
changed and the world is closer now to Bogot, but also because the city is at least five
degrees warmer than it was in those days and nobody wears gloves anymore. Global
Warming and the British Influence in Colombia, theres a title for a nice essay.
SP So its no coincidence that much of your novel Historia secreta de Costaguana is set in
London at the turn of the century, when the upper-class bogotanos traveled to London. At
that time Joseph Conrad was also there, writing Nostromo, which takes place in an imaginary
Latin American country he named Costaguana. Your novel is based on the three days Conrad

spent on the coast of Colombia, as well as on conversations he had with a Colombian in

London. Do you know if Conrad ever met a bogotano?
JGV He did meet a Colombian, Santiago Prez Triana, who was the son of a former liberal
president whod fled Colombia after persecution by the conservative government. He wound
up in London, and after some time, after reconciling himself with the country, he became an
ambassador. Conrad met him through their common friend, the Scottish adventurer Robert
Cunninghame-Graham, when he was writing Nostromo. This period coincided, too, with the
time in which Panama was separating from Colombia.
Anyway, there was also a very strong relationship with FranceColombians were always
traveling to Paris to study: Jos Asuncin Silva, the great Colombian poet, for instance.
SP On the coast we didnt have a fascination with England, but we did have the influence of
the French, and the Italians, and the Lebanese, and the Syrians.
JGV And the Germans. Foreign cultures and immigration came naturally to Barranquilla.
SP Sure. Being the main port city, Barranquilla was a total bazaar. Everything that came in
there then was taken to the interior through our own heart of darkness, our Magdalena River.
You refer to the river as the muddy Magdalena in Costaguana. I write about it in My
Colombian War. If the Congo was the heart of darkness for Conrad, to me the Magdalena is
the open wound of Colombia. To this day, everything floats through the Magdalena: the
drugs, the arms, the soldiers, the rebels, the paramilitariesbut also the medical supplies, the
teachers, and the priests.
Back to writing and leaving Colombia: many of the writers of your generation seem to spend
time in Europe. They go to Paris first, then Spain.
JGV Its almost a tradition, isnt it? For me, the decision to leave for Paris was the immediate
consequence of the decision to become a writer. The Latin American tradition dictated that I
had to leave, and Paris was the place to go.
SP Youre talking about the Boom writers.
JGV Yes, they were all expatriates and they were all obsessed with reinventing their
countries in literature. Take Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes. The great novels about Peru
were written in London and Paris. The great novels about Mexico were written in Paris and
New York. One Hundred Years of Solitude was written in Mexico. Its a Latin American
clich. Obviously, the Boom writers didnt invent this: in the 19th century Rubn Daro was
the first to believe that being in Paris would make him a poet. He more or less found the
same thing that I found, that the literary world in Paris didnt want him to write about
modern life, about life in the boulevards. They wanted Daro to write about the Latin

American landscapes. The exotic. Local color, thats what they wanted. This tension has
always existed. For my generation in Colombia, its magical realism.
SP Theres not much of that in your books. Was that a conscious decision? Did Alberto
Fuguet and Edmundo Paz Soldn, the founders of McOndo, the movement against magical
realism, influence you in any way?
JGV Not really. Mine wasnt a rebellious decision. It was conscious in the sense that my
working materials were not the same as Garca Mrquezs, so it was evident to me that itd
be useless to lean on his method. Literature is a question of method. Your job as a writer is to
find the method that is best suited for the story you want to convey, the characters you want
to conjure up. When Garca Mrquez started to write, he was bored to death by the
provincial, shortsighted, engag realism that was the accepted form for Latin American
novels. He wanted to retell the stories that his grandfather, a colonel in the great civil war of
1899, had told him. When he discovered Faulkner, he knew what his novels should read like.
So he had absolutely no problem in, so to speak, hiring Faulkner in order to write The
Leafstorm. After that, he gets rid of Faulkner, hires Hemingway, and works on No One
Writes to the Colonel. Hes just copying their methods. I faced a similar situation when I was
trying to write my novelsthe method of The Great Colombian Novelist was of absolutely
no use to me.
SP Garca Mrquez claims to have merely transcribed the way of speaking of his mother and
grandmother. You didnt really speak that languagemagical realism is not something you
hear in a household in Bogot.
JGV Thats it. My stories were at odds with the prevalent method, so I had to look for the
method elsewhere. A series of novels had lessons for me in them: Roths American Pastoral,
Banvilles The Untouchable, Bellows The Deans December.
SP So did you drop out of law school or are you actually a lawyer?
JGV I graduated with a very strange thesis about revenge as a legal prototype in The Iliad. I
dont even understand how I got that accepted as a project. Before finishing law school I
began studying French.
SP Because you had chosen Paris? Youd studied at the American School, so why Paris and
not New York?
JGV Someone once said to me that I have a hidden tendency to make things difficult for
myself, but I dont think thats it. I chose Paris because of what I thought Paris did to writers
or writer wannabes. The writers responsible for my vocation had something to do with Paris
at one point or another.
SP Are you talking about figures other than the Boom writers?

JGV The Lost Generation, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. But most of all Im talking about James
Joyce. Ulysses and One Hundred Years of Solitude are the books that made me want to
become a writer. Ulysses was written in Paris and Garca Mrquez lived in Paris for a while.
Almost all Latin American Boom writers, at some point or another, had lived in Paris: Julio
Cortzar, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes. And so Paris was, for me, the right city for somebody who
wanted to become a writer. How naive, no?
I spent three years there and learned very valuable things. The first year was great. The
second one, not so great. The third one, I just knew I wanted to leave and go somewhere else.
SP So did you arrive, look for an apartment, set down your computer, and start to write the
next day? How does one do that?
JGV The pretext was a masters degree at the Sorbonne. All I wanted was to be in Paris and
write there, so when the moment came to begin writing this big thing, a thesis at the
Sorbonne; I couldnt do it. I had to choose between writing a novel and writing that thesis. It
wasnt hard to choose the novel.
SP So you didnt go to Paris with an idea for a novel already in mind?
JGV I brought an almost-finished novel with me.
SP Was it actually written?
JGV I finished it two months after arriving in Paris, and it was published in 1997. Im fond
of it, but its not a mature piece of writing, so Ive disinherited it along with my second novel
thats why The Informers says that its my first novel. Im responsible for that bit of
disinformation.
SP In The Informers you address the ambiguous nature of truth and the dilemma of being a
storytelleryou call writers parasitic.
JGV The actual origin of the novel was a conversation I had in 1999 with a German Jewish
woman who had arrived in Colombia in 1938. She told me the story of her last years in
Germany and her life as an immigrant in Colombia. The material slept in boxes for three
years, waiting for me to learn how to handle it. In the meantime, my father-in-law underwent
heart surgery. Id sit outside his hospital room, waiting until he was well enough to describe
his operation to me so that I could use that in a story. Thats why I think of novelists as
parasitic: you feed upon the bad things that happen to other people and to yourself with an
astonishing lack of guilt. Everything is material for fiction; I have no qualms when it comes
to this. I love the idea that Dostoyevsky took the inscription on his mothers tombstone and
used it for one of his least lovable characters.

SP Identity is another big theme in The Informers. You describe Enrique Deresser as being
of mixed blood and no fixed nationality. I can relate to that, having stayed in New York
ever since I left Colombia at 15. Are you describing yourself a little bit there?
JGV I suppose I am. Ive lived abroad more than a third of my life, in France, Belgium, and
Spain. When I moved to Barcelona ten years ago, it was the third time I had left a country. I
write in Colombian Spanish and the scene of my novels is Colombia, although I dont live
there. Also, the countries Ive lived in have not shaped my cultural and literary ideas as much
as America or England have. So its unavoidable that I think about nationality, and
nationalisms of any kind, with a lot of skepticism.
SP So after Paris you moved to Barcelona instead of back home. What did Colombia
represent?
JGV I had left in 96, when Bogot had just come out of the most violent decade in its
history since the period we call La Violencia.
SP Thats when I decided to go back. I returned in 1999. Back then, Colombia was a record
holder: it had the highest numbers of kidnappings and homicides. Everyone was afraid to
leave their homes, and yet I would read in magazines that Colombians were the happiest
people in the world. There was an incredible disconnect that I wanted to experience.
JGV I decided not to go back because Bogot was still, in my mind, the city I had left behind
in 96, with the wars between the drug cartels and the government, the bombs, the
kidnappings. But just as violence was only one of the reasons that made me leave in the first
placebut not the reason, which was literatureit was only partially because of violence
that I didnt go back. The main reason to not return was actually abstract: I feared that if I
went back I wouldnt become the writer I wanted to become.
Id finished a second novel by the time I left Paris, but I wasnt satisfied with either of my
two novels. The fact that the second one, Alina suplicante (Supplicating Alina), was about to
be published and I was already unhappy with it threw me into a deep crisis. During my time
in Paris I had met a wonderful couple of 70-year-olds, Suzanne and Francis Laurenty. They
lived in a big house in the Belgian Ardennes. Their children had already married and left, so
there was a lot of room in their home. At the end of 1998, I visited them over a weekend
(something I did quite often) and told Francis about my crisis. He said, Well, why dont you
come and spend the week with us and just figure it out? At the end of the week they said,
No luck? Okay, stay for the whole month. At the end of the month they said, Stay for as
long as you like until you figure out what is going on.
SP Its a writers dream; you didnt have to apply for a writers colony. You think theyre still
taking Colombian writers?
JGV It was a writers colony, all right, only

SP Only you had it all to yourself.

JGV Yes, I led a sort of parallel life for ten months. In the mornings we went out and hunted,
say, a pheasant, then we would go back home and Suzanne would cook it for dinner.
SP And which story was cooking in your mind at the time?
JGV No stories. I was just trying to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be, and what
kind of readings would help me find that out. Ill never be able to read as much as I read that
year. After my year in Belgium, I knew Truman Capotes claim to read a book a day was
possible. So I discovered some essential writers for myself, like Conrad.
SP You wrote an entire homage to him.
JGV I dont think of La historia secreta de Costaguana as homage. If anything, I tried to
humanize the character of Conrad.
SP But humanizing him is such an homage. So why Conrad?
JGV Through his writing I learned what fiction is, what it should do, how it works. Things
that you dont get only from his fiction, but also from his prefaces, his letters, his few essays,
etcetera. These are huge and abstract concepts, but I cant tell you how concrete and
necessary they were to me.
Actually, both Conrad and Naipaul taught me to look at my country as an area of darkness.
They taught me that it was all right, even desirable, to have a tense relationship with my
birthplace; that loyalty to a country is hugely overrated. They taught me to see history in
terms of individuals, which, incredibly, is something we forget every now and then. What is
more, they taught me to see physical displacement as a source of creative energy.
SP In both of your books, the issue of displacement and the search to understand what
Colombia means are very strong. You must be familiar with Borgess story Ulrica, where
the main character pretends to be Colombian. When the object of his desire asks him what it
means to be Colombian, he says, Its an act of faith. Colombians quote that endlessly; I
disagree completely with their misuse of Borges. He was using that phrase as a pick-up line,
not as a nationalistic motto! I feel the same about the new governments campaign slogan
Colombia es pasin. Passion and faith belong in the bedroom and have nothing to do with
a citizens responsibility.
JGV Where do I sign? Thats exactly it. Part of my crisis back in 1999 was this inability to
write about Colombia. I didnt understand my country, its history, or its politics.
SP Neither did I. It makes me feel better to hear you say this. Among my friends there is a
huge void in how much we know, or care, about our historymaybe its because we went to

the American School, where there was a portrait of JFK in the classroom instead of one of
Simn Bolvar. We have cycles of violence every 50 years. Would you agree that an
explanation for that is our lack of interest in each other, our regionalist rivalry? Have you
traveled extensively through Colombia? I surely havent.
JGV Yes. The year I spent in Belgium, I realized that the prospect of writing about Colombia
had been too daunting for me. I had grown up with Hemingways idea that you should only
write about what you know, but I had also grown up with the image of Borges, who was the
first one to challenge the very Latin American idea that its writers have an obligation to write
about their countries. Novelists as ambassadors, right? Borges took that silly prejudice apart
in a little essay, The Argentine Writer and Tradition, and life has been easier for all of us
ever since. I didnt feel any kind of obligation to write about Colombia, but it bothered me
that I couldnt.
I was becoming obsessed with some gray areas of our history, of our geist as a people. But,
thinking I should understand something before writing about it, I felt incapable of taking on
these subjects. It was a terrible moment of paralysis. Talk about the blank page; I was facing
a blank world.
SP I did the reverse: I embarked on an education by writing. What about the country didnt
you understand?
JGV Ive always hated people talking about the spirit of their country and all those wellintentioned esoteric patriotisms. But thats what comes closer to what I didnt understand: the
soul, the abstract quality that makes Colombia what it is. It has a lot to do with the violence,
obviously, but it goes beyond it.
SP Was our violence becoming clearer in the Belgian countryside? Did you feel that through
your writing you could open our eyes to the chain of events happening in Colombia?
JGV No. If anything, I felt I could open my characters eyes. Any reader of my novels should
feel by the end that hes learned something, sure, but novels have never been only about
information, you know? The knowledge that can be derived from them is indirect,
ambiguous, and therefore enriching. Novels make us aware of the relationship between the
individual and history, of how that strange marriage works.
SP The same can be said of good nonfiction. The Informers underscores how there are two
sides to every story, the ambiguous nature of truth, and the need to know both sides for
reconciliation to happen.
JGV Countries and governments are the best storytellers! Their ability to convince, their
recourse to the best metaphors, their powerwhich novelists seldom haveto eliminate any
discordant element, anything that questions their narrative. History is a tale told by power;
theres nothing new in this. So one of the possible justifications of novelsnot that they

require anyis contradiction. Its not about telling what happened, but what could have
happened. What we call the past, public or private, is just a fixed narrative told for the first
time by someone with certain interests, prejudices, and biases. Novels remind us of that;
theres not one truth, one history, one past.

Author of In the Land of God and Man: Confronting Our Sexual Culture and My
Colombian War: A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind, Silvana Paternostro has
earned a nomination for the PEN PEN /Martha Abrams Award for First Nonfiction and a
place among Time/CNNs 50 Latin American Leaders for the New Millennium for her
vigilante writings.