by Juan Gabriel Vásquez ; translated by Anne McLean ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2018
A fine work of art about the blurry line between truth and artifice.
A novelist becomes embroiled in conspiracy theories surrounding political assassinations in his native Colombia.
Vásquez’s fifth novel in English (Reputations, 2016, etc.) is a Paul Auster–style intellectual thriller, built on one part violence and two parts history- and irony-soaked interrogation of authorship. The narrator is also a novelist named Juan Gabriel Vásquez, who makes the acquaintance of Francisco, a doctor with a sideline studying and collecting artifacts of Colombian history, such as the 1948 assassination of politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. For instance, Francisco owns an X-ray of Gaitán’s bullet-ridden chest and a piece of his vertebra in formaldehyde in a jar, both counterweights to truthers who believe he had more than one assassin—truthers like Francisco’s friend Carlos, who so exasperates Juan Gabriel with his ahistorical riffs on 9/11, JFK, and Gaitán that the author flings a whiskey glass in his face. What kind of person gets so ridiculously obsessed with such contrarianism? But how ridiculous is it, exactly? Vásquez’s goal is to better understand such thinking, and the novel is largely a study of another political assassination, of political figure Rafael Uribe Uribe in 1914. Officially, Uribe was crudely murdered by a pair of angry tradesmen acting alone. But Juan Gabriel's investigation leads him to a lawyer who at the time was exploring a deeper (and not-untenable) plot, distilling his findings into articles and a book. Was he mocked for lack of evidence or something more? A person’s “noblest task” is to “thwart a lie the size of the world,” Carlos tells Juan Gabriel, and the novel captures the questionable seductiveness of the job: This book, by design, is immersive in the way quicksand is, pulling the reader in directions often best resisted. Like any conspiracy theory, it’s overly thick with information, but Vásquez successfully gives it a novelistic shape.
A fine work of art about the blurry line between truth and artifice.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1114-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Share your opinion of this book
More by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
BOOK REVIEW
by Juan Gabriel Vásquez translated by Anne McLean
BOOK REVIEW
by Juan Gabriel Vásquez ; translated by Anne McLean
BOOK REVIEW
by Juan Gabriel Vásquez ; translated by Anne McLean
by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
20
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2019
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Share your opinion of this book
More by Sally Rooney
BOOK REVIEW
by Sally Rooney
BOOK REVIEW
by Sally Rooney
BOOK REVIEW
by Sally Rooney
More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Toni Morrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 29, 1970
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
Share your opinion of this book
More by Toni Morrison
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Toni Morrison edited by David Carrasco Stephanie Paulsell Mara Willard
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.