The Informers

by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Book Overview

The first novel from a global literary superstar and author of The Sound of Things Falling. "Juan Gabriel V?squez's The Informers is a thrilling new discovery." --Colm T?ib?n "One of the most original... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594488789
• ISBN13: 9781594488788
• Release Date: July 2009
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Length: 351 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.8" x 8.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

The delicate space between public and private

The Informers is a case study of words: words uttered carelessly, meaningfully, traitorously. It concerns itself with not only the interpretations, but also the appropriateness, of these words, of rhetoric itself, and in so doing questions the way we write and understand histories. Yes, histories. What Juan Gabriel Vásquez has constructed is a web of intermingling stories, centered on the World War II era and thereafter in Colombia. These narratives alternatively corroborate and contradict; even in recounting the same events, one's telling is always somewhat different from another's. Calling on historical orators -- from Demosthenes to Jorge Eliécer Gaitán -- the author draws attention to the lasting and powerful effects of speech and memory on the lives of those who have spoken and heard. On the surface, The Informers is the tale of Gabriel Santoro, the son and namesake of a venerated Colombian rhetorician, and his stubborn attempt to recapture and reassemble the missing pieces -- the deliberate omissions and deceptions -- from his late father's life. Much of Gabriel's (the father's) story is related by a lifelong friend: Sara Guterman, a Jewish German emigré whose father was among the lucky few of his compatriots to successfully invent a new life in Colombia, was instrumental in helping Gabriel (the son) put together the various components that comprised his father's life. What is reality to one is fiction to another, however, and it is soon apparent that the son understood very little of the truth of his father's past. Deep in the throes of an apparently life-ending illness, the senior Santoro tells his son, "Memory isn't public, Gabriel." This proclamation is indirectly the result of the dying man's scathing review of his son's book, A Life in Exile, which chronicled the life story of Sara Guterman and the struggle of German immigrants to find acceptance in a Colombia beset with war-heightened xenophobia. The son, however, feels differently than his father on the subject of remembering. Meanwhile, Sara remains almost indecipherable, seemingly ambivalent at times, suspended as she is between the imperative to record a tragedy for posterity and the loyalty she feels to a lifelong friend. What is left in the end is Gabriel the younger's version of events, a retelling of past cowardice that suggests a personal betrayal of its own. The Informers is neither a political nor a journalistic endeavor, but the ideas within resonate in both arenas, as Vásquez masterfully shoves the public and private spheres into an uncomfortably small space. The result is an unsettling, and highly relevant, set of difficult questions. In an era of unprecedented media ubiquity and the much-ballyhooed shrinking of personal privacy, The Informers provides no easy answers, but at least it has done us the service of starting a necessary conversation. [...]

Shadows of history: Case for Colombia

One hallmark of a gifted novelist is the ability to see the potential for compelling fiction in an incident, anecdote or scrap of history, no matter how dry or seemingly obscure, that others have overlooked. By that standard and several others, the career of Juan Gabriel Vásquez, a Colombian writer born in 1973, is off to a notable start with "The Informers," his ambitious first english translated novel from his native spanish. His topic is one of the least-known episodes of World War II. Fearful of Nazi influence in Latin America, the United States, acting through J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I. and the State Department, compiled a list of suspected Axis sympathizers and then pressured compliant governments to intern those named, often on the basis of sketchy or dubious intelligence. Anti-Fascist refugees from Germany and Italy, along with the descendants of immigrants from those countries and Japan, were snared in that net and frequently imprisoned together with real Nazis. There were other abuses: corrupt government officials and covetous neighbors would sometimes falsely accuse prosperous émigrés, hoping to gain control of their expropriated businesses and homes. "The system of blacklists gave power to the weak, and the weak are the majority," one character in "The Informer" muses bitterly. "That was life during those years: a dictatorship of weakness. The dictatorship of resentment," in which there were thousands "who accused, who denounced, who informed." The parallels with the contemporary war on terror are clear, though Mr. Vásquez chooses not to make them explicit. In remarks last year to the PEN American Center, he recalled Balzac's maxim that "novels are the private histories of nations," and that is the approach he deftly applies here, telling his story through the experience of three families. At the start of "The Informers," a young Bogotá writer named Gabriel Santoro has just written a book about the Enemy Alien Control Program, as Washington called it, based on the recollections of Sara Guterman, an elderly German Jewish émigré and family friend. To his shock and distress his father, a distinguished professor of law and oratory also named Gabriel, savages the book in a review, causing a rift between the two. The novel is constructed across four dates. The first is 1988, when journalist Gabriel Santoro stumbles on one of the hidden parts of Colombian history: the story of how Germans and Austrians were treated during the second world war. At first, those who opposed Hitler were regarded in the same way as Nazi sympathisers, but when President Santos took Colombia into the war on the side of the allies, Nazi sympathisers had their businesses confiscated and found themselves interned as possible spies and fifth columnists. The book Gabriel writes about this, A Life in Exile, is generally well received, except by his own father, who writes a damning criticism of it. Gabriel's father then distances himself from his son, only relenti

A New Book by a Fantastic Author

"The Informers" is undeniably a fantastic book by first time Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vasquez. The book is the fictional story of the narrator's search for truth about his father, and focuses on the experience of German immigrants in Colombia during World War Two. The narrator's life quickly changes for the better only to see it crumble once again, and he must figure out what happened during the 1940s that set off the change of events that sent his life into a tailspin.