Lovers on All Saints' Day

Starred review from May 4, 2015
These stories from Vasquez (The Sound of Things Falling) were originally published in Spanish, in 2001, when the Colombian author was in self-imposed exile in Europe and aghast at how “fate or fluke is the name we give to events beyond our control that lay waste to our soaring dreams.” A number of Vasquez’s characters are middle-aged or old, mostly flawed men falling toward solitude at the expense of their lovers and wives. Many of the settings are in the forests of the Ardennes, peopled with hunters and fishermen, and impart a kind of foreboding; the metaphors for which Vasquez is celebrated abound: in “Hiding Places,” an immature fish cannot be saved when lured by a callous sportsman; in “The Lodger,” an address book once rejected by a lover contains beautiful maps of places that do not exist. The title story tells of a man who agrees to spend All Hallow’s Eve night with a young widow, even donning her dead husband’s pajamas to comfort her. Vasquez charts the internal struggles of small men whose mistakes and betrayals condemn them to a confounding world that repeatedly fails to satisfy, a world about which one character wonders “if everything had a human cause and another random one...” The stories “go into dark places and come back with the news. It’s not necessarily geographical,” Vasquez has said, but they do shed “light on dark places of the soul.”

May 15, 2015
Newly translated stories from the author of The Sound of Things Falling (2013, etc.). Set in Belgium and France, these are mostly stories of middle-aged men and women who have reached-or are just past-crisis points in their relationships. Hunting is also a recurring theme. In "The All Saints' Day Lovers," a man is surprised when, after months of contemplating a split, his wife is the one who chooses to leave. In "The Lodger," a husband realizes that, in death, his wife's old lover will haunt their marriage forever. In "At the Cafe de la Republique," a man worried that he has cancer convinces the wife he's abandoned to accompany him on a visit to his estranged father. The women in these stories are lovely ciphers. The men are incapable of self-reflection but suffused with self-pity. One narrator asserts that "lovers are not made for pondering the consequences of their own actions." That this character would believe this is utterly plausible, but such willful opacity makes for some rather enervated fiction. The text is occasionally enlivened with an evocative detail or a striking metaphor-"The rubber soles of their waterproof boots barely dented the silence"; morning sickness is "a ball of nausea the size of a horse's eye"-but these moments are rare. The strongest piece in the collection, "The Return," is thematically and stylistically exceptional. The pair at its center is not a husband and wife, but, rather, two sisters. "I'll tell the story as it was told to me," the narrator announces at the beginning. The distance between reader and narrative that is typical of these works doesn't feel like an emotional gulf here. Instead, it becomes a classic Gothic framing device, perfect for a tale of murder and revenge. Lackluster accounts of men feeling sorry for themselves. Sometimes while hunting.

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July 1, 2015

Vasquez's late-1990s sojourn in Belgium and France, far from his native Colombia, provides the setting for these seven stories, which originally appeared in 2001, before his later successes with The Secret History of Castaguana and the Alfaguara Prize-winning The Sound of Things Falling. The most important theme here is that of broken relationships, marital as well as familial, with the narratives revolving around episodes of separations and infidelity; in one story, for instance, even as a wife awaits the return of her husband with wood for their stove, he beds another woman, pained by the problems in his marriage. Such episodes are perhaps best summed up by the cynical remark, "Lovers are not made for pondering the consequences of their own actions." In keeping with the title, the stories take place in late fall and involve deaths, emotional as well as physical. VERDICT These early efforts by a bright new star in Latin American literature stand on their own as examinations of imperfect communication in severely wounded relationships in which love (but not necessarily sex) has long ago disappeared. But despite some clever scenarios and a profound knowledge of hunting (another unifying factor), the sometimes awkward dialog, skeletal plots, and open endings may leave readers dangling.--Lawrence Olszewski, North Central State Coll., Mansfield, OH

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2015
In this story collection, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean, Vasquez returns repeatedly to triangular relationships. He has been compared to fellow South American Roberto Bolano, but the more apt analogy may be James Salter, who works in a similarly spare style and is also unafraid to write about sex. Vasquez's characters enter into affairs impulsively and often improbably. Although these characters make choices and deal with their consequences, a strain of fatalism runs through the seven stories, each set in or around Belgium. Vasquez is interested in the distances between men and women, not so much what opens them as how one closes them and whereboth physically and psychicallyone goes next. In the last and longest story, Life on Grimsey Island, he meditates on such a distance before it even forms: But that woman didn't have a face, and wasn't expecting him, and could not know that her life, in that instant, was beginning to be different because Oliveira was traveling toward her. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)