A Collection of Stories Based on Colombia’s Troubled History


SONGS FOR FLAMES
by Juan Gabriel Vasquez
Translated by Anne McLean

In an author’s note “Lovers on All Saints’ Day” in the 2015 short story collection Juan Gabriel Vasquez He writes that something he once heard Tobias Wolff say guided his choice: “A storybook should be like a novel where the characters don’t know each other.” “lovers”, a master class in maintaining atmosphere and mood, deftly meets Wolff’s standard. Vasquez’s haunting and beautiful new collection “Songs for the Flames” is likewise unified in tone and theme, but six of his nine stories are told in the first person by someone who appears to be the same character; He doesn’t say much about himself but tells stories about people he can’t get out of his mind. Even the other three pieces sound like stories this narrator might have gathered and might have been telling indirectly.

Was Wolff’s maxim abandoned or supported? Maybe just stress tested. The protagonists of these stories do not know each other, but the author-narrator knows them all and seeks something very important about himself and his homeland’s long, troubled past through their lives and his own acts of archival imagination. Colombia. First, the title story unravels two centuries of Colombian and transatlantic history from the narrator’s purchase of an old grammar book after an algorithm searches through his online search history and recommends it to the seller.

The narrator is primarily a listener and observer, revealing himself to us through the quality and direction of his attention. “Autofiction” is an intellectually and aesthetically bankrupt concept at this point, so the last thing I want to talk about in the precious little space is to defend this subversive collection, but if you appreciate the wit, I might as well point out. and the ambiguities of the genre’s best practitioners, you’ll have some sympathy for what Vasquez is trying to do here. Still, his sense of literature steeped in history, fiction and nonfiction, and not so blurred as to blur the lines between science and imagination, may owe Borges more than anyone else. I came to think of Borges as a covert realist and even (destroy thought!) a pioneer of autofiction, because his stories are often as attentive to the compositional process as to the contours of his own thought. to their fabulist arrogance.

Borges wrote “Songs for Flames”, one from his short story “The End” (which is himself a reimagining of the 19th century Argentine epic “Martin Fierro”) and the other from his poem “All Our Yesterdays.” “I want to know who owns my past,” Borges writes; The narrator of “Songs” wants the same thing.

By the way, the title of Borges’ poem comes from “Macbeth”, which we remember that sometimes you get so much blood on your hands that you can’t clean it even after washing it. “Songs for Flames” is a book about war and imperialism that, in Vasquez’s view, never truly ends, but rather mutates: here they are transformed into individual traumas that have paid off for generations, there they are transformed into state corruption and endless cycles of violence. “Songs” by Phil Klayredeployment” and Luke Mogelson’s “These Heroic, Happy Dead”, even Tim O’Brien’s classic”The Things They CarryBut these are American books and their successful style, and despite their righteous indignation, they are primarily concerned with the tainting of American innocence—another intellectually and aesthetically bankrupt idea that much of the world has long abandoned, if they had the luxury of believing it. at first.

“Songs for Flames” is finally a book about secrets and lies, namely speech acts: their immense power, but also the limits of that power and the miserable ecstasy of revelations. Or recognition. Because discovering a secret is not the same as being told to someone, which is again something other than keeping a secret. “It wasn’t a relief for the truth he was going to reveal,” thinks an old soldier in “The Frogs” of a long-kept secret I won’t break here. Rather, it was “something that could only be strength: the power to take others with you, to drag them off the cliff to go with him.”



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