Retrospective by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (translated by Anne McLean) came to me via a Goodreads list, as many books do. I suspect it might not be the last book to tempt me from their list of 54 new books to discover this Hispanic Heritage Month (which runs in the US from 15th September to 15th October each year). Even if we take my desire to read around the world out of the equation, there are a lot of very interesting sounding books on this list. Spoiler alert: this one exceeded my expectations.
One of the reasons I’m not reading books from each continent/region in turn is that I imagine that some regions will have a lot of books focusing on certain themes or belonging to certain genres, and I don’t want to reach saturation point and get bored. Take Latin America for example: I like magical realism, it’s probably one of my favourite genres, but I don’t think I can read too much magical realism in one go. I did think that I’d probably go the magical realism route for Colombia, home of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the big daddy of the genre… then Retrospective came along.
Retrospective is a fictionalised novel about the film director Sergio Cabrera, based on fact. Spanning the 20th century, the book tells the story of Cabrera’s family against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, La Violencia, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Colombian Conflict, and more. The authors note explains it’s the result of “seven years of encounters and more than 30 hours of recorded conversations” with Cabrera, plus input from Cabrera’s sister, Marianella, diaries, other source material, family friends, etc. That sounds like it’s going to be quite dry, but for the most part it wears the source material lightly.
He’d been lost, had blisters on his feet and embarrassed himself by getting frightened by a churrusco caterpillar’ [Fausto fleeing to join the EPL’s National Directorate]
The story is often astonishing. The narrative voice manages to be sparse but warm, holding everything together. It’s also often quite funny. There are elements which must be anecdotes from Sergio or his sister, and those made my heart sing. Marianella in particular is a fascinating character, and I’m so glad we got to hear so much of (what I assume is) her voice.
I don’t think I’ve read a book explicitly set in Colombia before, but reading this made me realise how much of Louis de Bernières’ Latin American trilogy is based on Colombian history, geography and politics. Those are among my favourite ever books, and I’m so pleased that this book has been added to that list, too.
Having said all that, I did find that there were places where the source material got the better of the book, and things dragged.
What kind of future was coming down on this divided country […] where people seemed to have discovered new and powerful reasons to hate each other to death?
Politics is obviously a major theme in this book, or rather the fallout after political events. Another theme which became increasingly obvious as the book went on is family: what we will do to earn the respect of our parents, and how many of our hopes and dreams are inherited rather than our own.
As you can probably guess, this was a five-star read for me. It’s a book I keep returning to think about.
If you’d like to read more about the books I’m reading on my challenge to read around the world, you can find the page where I keep track of them here.
Cover Photo by Flavia Carpio on Unsplash
