Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highcler Castle
The Countess of Carnarvon, 2013
Crown Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780770435622
Summary
Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey tells the story behind Highclere Castle, the real-life inspiration and setting for Julian Fellowes’s Emmy Award-winning PBS show, and the life of one of its most famous inhabitants, Lady Almina, the 5th Countess of Carnarvon.
Drawing on a rich store of materials from the archives of Highclere Castle, including diaries, letters, and photographs, the current Lady Carnarvon has written a transporting story of this fabled home on the brink of war.
Much like her Masterpiece Classic counterpart Lady Cora Crawley, Lady Almina was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Alfred de Rothschild, who married his daughter off at a young age, her dowry serving as the crucial link in the effort to preserve the Earl of Carnarvon's ancestral home. Throwing open the doors of Highclere Castle to tend to the wounded of World War I, Lady Almina distinguished herself as a brave and remarkable woman.
This rich tale contrasts the splendor of Edwardian life in a great house against the backdrop of the First World War and offers an inspiring and revealing picture of the woman at the center of the history of Highclere Castle. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1963
• Raised—Greater London, England, UK
• Education—University of St Andrews
• Currently—lives in Highclere Castle, Berkshire, England
Fiona Carnarvon is the eldest of six daughters born to Ronnie Aitken and Francis Farmer. Her father worked in London in banking and rescuing companies. His father had been a general in the army and came from a family of generals and landowners. "But the family lost everything, so my father went to work in the city,” says Lady Carnarvon.
Fiona studied English and German at the University of St Andrews before becoming a senior auditor at Coopers & Lybrand. In 1995 she established her own fashion label, Azur, which operated until 2004.
In 1996 she met her husband, George Herbert, at a charity dinner. The two shared a love of World War I poetry, and three years later they married. After his father died in 2001, "Geordie" became the 8th Earl of Carnarvon, and Fiona became the Countess of Carnarvon. The couple took over the tenureship of Highclere Castle, Berkshire, where they continue to live with their son, Edward.
The castle has provided the inspiration and setting for the television series Downton Abbey and, following the show’s popularity, Lady Carnarvon has written Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle (2011), a book about the history of the castle during the First World War and her husband’s great-grandmother. (Adapted from The Telegraph, 12/22/2011.)
See the article in the Weekly Review.
Book Reviews
Few viewers know that Downton’s American chatelaine, Cora Crawley, was inspired by the real-life fifth Countess of Carnarvon, Almina Wombwell. In this history, the current Countess of Carnarvon portrays her ancestress-by-marriage as a rich and lovely arriviste who married the fifth Earl of Carnarvon in 1895. She presided over Highclere Castle (where today’s series is filmed), and the book includes lustrous photographs of Lady Almina that look like Gainsboroughs
Liesl Schillinger - New York Times
The more interesting and entertaining book is Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle. Written by the castle's current countess, Lady Fiona Carnarvon, the Eighth Countess of Carnarvon and great-granddaughter-in-law of Lady Almina, the book is a fascinating look at the woman of the house who turned her castle into a hospital for wounded British soldiers returning from World War I. (It corresponds perfectly with this season's war story line on Downton Abbey.)
USA Today
If you can’t wait for the new season of Downton Abbey ...this one’s for you....a revealing portrait of the changing times.”
New York Post
[A] fascinating insight into how the seriously rich once lived.
Newsweek Daily Beast
The present Lady Carnarvon, who tapped the family archives for her comprehensive research, dramatically captures the estate during the pre-war and war years, and paints a compelling...portrait of Lady Almina.
Newark Star-Ledger
Discussion Questions
1. Lady Almina’s wealth contributed to her social success, but far more was required to achieve prestige in her husband’s circles. What special traits and wisdom did she possess?
2. How does Downton Abbey’s Lady Cora Crawley compare to Almina? Is Cora at a disadvantage because she is American, or did outsiders perhaps have the upper hand in Edwardian England?
3. When Lady Almina opened Highclere Castle to wounded military officers, she wanted to deliver more than first-rate medical treatment; she understood that a beautiful environment would enhance the healing process as well. What can twenty-first-century medicine learn from her?
4. The author describes heated Edwardian debates over taxing the wealthy, reforms to the House of Lords, immigration, and the National Insurance Bill—issues that remain controversial today. Lady Almina was a vocal conservative. If you had been a member of the landed gentry, would you have sided with the Liberals or the Tories? How did Aubrey balance his election as a conservative with his liberal beliefs?
5. What inspired Lord Carnarvon and Aubrey to immerse themselves in worlds far removed from the English countryside? What was at the root of Lord Carnarvon’s enthusiasm for Egyptian antiquities? What surprising details did the book provide about foreign affairs in the early twentieth century?
6. Were you enticed or dismayed by the role of aristocratic women from Almina’s generation? How did they gain power? How was their power limited by their husbands and by social custom? If you were the widow Almina, would you have remarried as she did?
7. As the author provided vivid descriptions of the wardrobes, interior decorations, and feasts that marked Highclere Castle, which aspects captured your imagination the most? Was Almina’s lavish spending a good investment?
8. How did you react to the parenting protocols of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras? Was it reasonable for children of the aristocracy, whose lives were woven with royalty, to be held to a higher standard of behavior? How were the expectations for raising Porchy different from those for raising Eve?
9. Discuss the solid marriage that Almina and Lord Carnarvon enjoyed. How were they able to make a good match despite the strict courtship methods they had to follow? What accounts for the way they balanced freedom and mutual support throughout their marriage?
10. Is nobility a burden or a blessing? How would you have fared at Highclere as a servant, or as an administrative aide such as Mary Weekes?
11. How do the woes of Downton Abbey’s Earl of Grantham compare to those of Lord Carnarvon? How does the history of Highclere enhance your appreciation for the show? What might Almina and Lord Carnarvon think of Downton Abbey?
12. The author notes that it was the economic fallout of the Second World War, combined with new tax structures, that made it impossible to maintain the opulence of previous generations at Highclere Castle. Why is it important to preserve the building and its history, if not the lifestyle, in contemporary times?
13. Discuss your own family legacies that are tied to this time period. How did status and class affect your ancestors? Did any of them serve in the Great War? Which of your family legacies—financial or otherwise—were formed a century ago?
(Discussion questions by the publisher.)
Under My Skin
Orville Lloyd Douglas, 2014
Guernica Editions
80 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781550718492
Summary
Under My Skin is an incendiary collection of poetry which explores the life of a gay black man. The collection is semi-autobiographical and is separated into six sections. The poems explore taboo subjects such as a discussion about male homosexuality in the black community.
Under My Skin also looks at the conflict Douglas has with his Canadian identity. Many of poems ask what does it mean to be a Canadian? Is it just about skin colour? Are Canadian people only white? The poems also challenge the ideology that gay male sexuality should be hidden and not in the public sphere.
Author Bio
• Birth—September 26, 1976
• Where—Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Education—B.A., York University
• Currently—lives in Toronto
Book Reviews
Douglas is an essential poet just as his publisher's logo exclaims, for he's able to wrangle pure anger into pure poetry.... The fiery African-American poet Amiri Baraka is dead? No his spirit could drive Douglas's howls against the glib appeal of multiculturalism, so silent about anti- black, anti-native racism. But Douglas is sick of hypocritical cries of racial unity that exclude gay black men.
George Elliott Clarke - Chronicle Herald
Discussion Questions
1. Does multiculturalism really mean racial unity exists between people in Canada?
2. Why are gay black men invisible in black heterosexual and gay communities?
3. Is anger a valid emotion, or is it simply a waste of energy?
4. Why are some gay black men afraid to come out of the closet?
5. Are heterosexual black people hypocritical they whine and cry about racism yet they discriminate against black LGBT people?
6. Is Canada really more advanced than the United States in relation to race issues? Although gay rights have progressed in Canada do LGBT issues really matter or are discussed in non white communities?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Haruki Murakami, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385352109
Summary
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the long-awaited new novel—a book that sold more than a million copies the first week it went on sale in Japan—from the award-winning, internationally best-selling author Haruki Murakami.
Here he gives us the remarkable story of Tsukuru Tazaki, a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present. It is a story of love, friendship, and heartbreak for the ages. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 12, 1949
• Where—Kyoto, Japan
• Education—Waseda University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives near Tokyo
Haruki Murakami is a contemporary Japanese writer. Murakami has been translated into 50 languages and his best-selling books have sold millions of copies.
His works of fiction and non-fiction have garnered critical acclaim and numerous awards, both in Japan and internationally, including the World Fantasy Award (2006) and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award (2006), while his oeuvre garnered among others the Franz Kafka Prize (2006) and the Jerusalem Prize (2009). Murakami's most notable works include A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-1995), Kafka on the Shore (2002), and 1Q84 (2009–2010). He has also translated a number of English works into Japanese, from Raymond Carver to J. D. Salinger.
Murakami's fiction, often criticized by Japan's literary establishment as un-Japanese, was influenced by Western writers from Chandler to Vonnegut by way of Brautigan. It is frequently surrealistic and melancholic or fatalistic, marked by a Kafkaesque rendition of the recurrent themes of alienation and loneliness he weaves into his narratives. He is also considered an important figure in postmodern literature. Steven Poole of The Guardian praised Murakami as "among the world's greatest living novelists" for his works and achievement.
In recent years, Haruki Murakami has often been mentioned as a possible recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Nonetheless, since all nomination records are sealed for 50 years from the awarding of the prize, it is pure speculation. When asked about the possibility of being awarded the Nobel Prize, Murakami responded with a laugh saying "No, I don't want prizes. That means you're finished.
Recognition / Awards
1982 - Noma Literary Prize for A Wild Sheep Chase.
1985 - Tanizaki Prize for Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
1995 - Yomiuri Prize for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
2006 - World Fantasy Award for Kafka on the Shore.
2006 - Franz Kafka Prize
2007 - Kiriyama Prize for Fiction
2007 - honorary doctorate, University of Liege
2008 - honorary doctorate, Princeton University
2009 - Jerusalem Prize
2011 - International Catalunya Prize
2014 - honorary doctorate, Tufts University
Controversy
The Jerusalam Award is presented a biennially to writers whose work deals with themes of human freedom, society, politics, and government. When Murakami won the award in 2009, protests erupted in Japan and elsewhere against his attending the award ceremony in Israel, including threats to boycott his work as a response against Israel's recent bombing of Gaza. Murakami chose to attend the ceremony, but gave a speech to the gathered Israeli dignitaries harshly criticizing Israeli policies. Murakami said, "Each of us possesses a tangible living soul. The system has no such thing. We must not allow the system to exploit us."
Murakami donated his €80,000 winnings from the Generalitat of Catalunya (won in 2011) to the victims of the earthquake and tsunami, and to those affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Accepting the award, he said in his speech that the situation at the Fukushima plant was "the second major nuclear disaster that the Japanese people have experienced... however, this time it was not a bomb being dropped upon us, but a mistake committed by our very own hands." According to Murakami, the Japanese people should have rejected nuclear power after having "learned through the sacrifice of the hibakusha just how badly radiation leaves scars on the world and human wellbeing." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/19/2014.)
Book Reviews
This is the kind of blah surrealism for which Mr. Murakami is so beloved by his fans, who will go to any lengths to justify why a minor book like Colorless Tsukuru still has the author’s special je ne sais quoi. The dreaminess of the passage is its stylistic trademark, but there are other, less woozy ways to say that bitter experience toughens Tsukuru into a new man
Janet Maslin - New York Times
This is a book for both the new and experienced reader. It has a strange casualness, as if it unfolded as Murakami wrote it; at times, it seems like a prequel to a whole other narrative. The feel is uneven, the dialogue somewhat stilted…Yet there are moments of epiphany gracefully expressed, especially in regard to how people affect one another…The book reveals another side of Murakami, one not so easy to pin down. Incurably restive, ambiguous and valiantly struggling toward a new level of maturation. A shedding of Murakami skin.
Patti Smith - New York Times Book Review
[A] remarkable novel [that] takes us on a spellbinding descent through the rings of hell in Tsukuru Tazaki’s young life.... A virtual symphony of literary and musical referents. Murakami’s wizardry lies in his ability to pack all that cultural and spiritual resonance into a book that is as tightly wound as a Dashiell Hammett mystery. . . . Murakami can herd the troubles of a very large world and still mind a few precious details. He may be taking us deeper and deeper into a fractured modernity and its uneasy inhabitants, but he is ever alert to minds and hearts, to what it is, precisely, that they feel and see, and to humanity’s abiding and indomitable spirit.... A deeply affecting novel, not only for the dark nooks and crannies it explores, but for the magic that seeps into its characters’ subconsciouses, for the lengths to which they will go to protect or damage one another, for the brilliant characterizations it delivers along the way.... A page-turner with intervals of lapidary prose and dazzling human comprehension.
Marie Arana - Washington Post
[A] feeling...lingered with me for days after I read Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, a feeling of having experienced some extreme vividness, some extreme force of emotion. I'm still not sure exactly what it was. "An encounter with genius" may be the answer.... Murakami is like Edward Hopper or Arvo Part, his simplicities earned, his exactingly artful techniques permitting him a higher kind of artlessness.... [Colorless Tsukuru is a] sincere, soft-spoken story.... There is an intoxicating mood of nostalgia.... Tsukuru's pilgrimage will never end, because he is moving constantly away from his destination, which is his old self. This is a narrow poignancy, but a powerful one, and Murakami is its master. Perhaps that's why he has come to speak not just for his thwarted nation, but for so many of us who love art—since it's only there, alas, in novels such as this one, that we're allowed to live twice.
Charles Finch - Chicago Tribune
[Murakamai] has opened his vision, his sensibility, to reflect the distances implicit in being alive. . . . More than just a story but rather a meditation on everything the narrative provokes. How do we connect, or reconnect, to those around us but also to the very essence of ourselves? Where, in the flatness of contemporary society—which in this novel, as in so much of his work, Murakami evokes with a masterful understatement—do we find some point of intersection, some lasting depth? . . . There is a rawness, a vulnerability, to these characters, a sense that the surface of the world is thin, and the border between inner and outer life, between existence as we know it and something far more elusive, is easily effaced.
David L. Ulin - Los Angeles Times
Bold and colorful threads of fiction blur smoothly together to form the muted white of an almost ordinary realism. Like J.M. Coetzee, Murakami smoothly interlaces allegorical meanings with everyday particulars of contemporary social reality. The shadows cast may be larger than life, but the figures themselves feel stirringly human.... This new novel chronicles a spiritual quest that might also be a love story. But here the author strips away the magical quavers of reality and the mind-bending plot structures that have become hallmarks of his work.... Readers find themselves propelled along by the ebb and flow of an internal logic that feels as much like a musical progression as it does an unfolding of events. The steady calm of the prose, the ambient rhythms of recurring motifs like Fraz Liszt's "Le Mal du Pays," and the close attention to repetitive patterns in characters' lives bring readers into a carefully measured cadence like that of Tsukuru's pared-down lifestyle.... Thanks to Philip Gabriel's discerning translation into subtle yet artful language, the novel[‘s]...ease and obviousness convey an internal complexity that you ‘get’ without realizing it.... Tsukuru's situation will resonate with anyone who feels adrift in this age of Google and Facebook.
Christopher Weinberger - San Francisco Chronicle
(Starred review.) This is a book for both the new and experienced reader.... The feel is uneven, the dialogue somewhat stilted… Yet there are moments of epiphany gracefully expressed, especially in regard to how people affect one another…. Incurably restive, ambiguous and valiantly struggling toward a new level of maturation.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Hypnotically fascinating.... A journey of immense magnitude, both physically...and, of course, metaphysically, as Tazaki attempts to make sense of his own inner world and the dreams that shape his other dimension.... In the end, Murakami writes love stories, all the more tender and often tragic for their exploration of the multiple realities in which is lovers live.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Murakami turns in a trademark story that blends the commonplace with the nightmarish in a Japan full of hollow men.... Murakami writes with the same murky sense of time that characterized 1Q84, but this book [is] short and haunting.... The reader will enjoy watching Murakami play with color symbolism down to the very last line of the story.... Another tour de force from Japan’s greatest living novelist.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What is the significance of the name of the novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage? Why is Tsukuru branded "colorless"? Would you say that this an accurate description of him? Is this how Tsukuru sees himself or is it how he is seen by others? What kind of pilgrimage does Tsukuru embark upon and how does he change as a result of this pilgrimage? What causes these changes?
2. Why does Tsukuru wait so many years before attempting to find out why he was banished from the group? How does he handle the deep depression he feels as a result of this rejection and how is he changed by this period of suffering? Is Tsukuru the only character who suffers in this way? If not, who else suffers at what is the cause? Do you believe that their distress could have been avoided? If so, how?
3. Do you consider Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki a realistic work of fiction? Why or why not? What fantastical or surreal elements does Murakami employ in the novel and what purpose do they serve? What do these elements reveal that strictly realistic elements might not? Kuro says, "I do think that sometimes a certain kind of dream can be even stronger than reality" (310). In considering genre, do you believe that this is true?
4.Tsukuru reveals that his father chose his name, which means "to make things." Is this an apt name for Tsukuru? Why or why not? How does Tsukuru’s understanding of his own name affect the way that he sees himself? Where else in the story does the author address making things? Are they portrayed as positive or useful activities?
5. Why is Tsukuru’s friendship with Haida so important? What is the outcome of this relationship? How does the relationship ultimately affect Tsukuru’s perception of himself? Does it alter Tsukuru’s response to the rejection he was subjected to years earlier in any way?
6. Why does Haida share with Tsukuru the story about his father and the strange piano player who speaks of death? What might this teach us about the purpose of storytelling? How does Tsukuru react to this story? Is he persuaded by Haida’s tale? What does the story teach us about belief and the power of persuasion?
7. Sara says that we live in an age where "we’re surrounded by an enormous amount of information about other people. If you feel like it, you can easily gather than information about them. Having said that, we still hardly know anything about people" (148). Do the characters in the story know each other very well? Do you believe that technology in today’s world has helped or hindered us in knowing each other better?
8. When Tsukuru finally sees three of his friends again, how have each of them changed? How do they react to seeing one another after all this time? Are their reactions strange and unexpected or predictable? What unexpected changes have taken place over the years, and why are they surprising to Tsukuru? Has anything remained consistent?
9. When Tsukuru visits the pizzeria in Finland, how does he react after realizing he is the only one there who is alone? How is this different from his usual response to isolation throughout the story? Discuss what this might indicate about the role that setting plays in determining Tsukuru’s emotional state.
10. Does Tsukuru’s self-image and understanding of his role within the group align with how they saw Tsukuru and perceived his role in their group? If not, what causes differences in their perceptions? Do Tsukuru’s thoughts about his rejection from the group align with his friends’ understanding of why he was banished? How did Tsukuru’s banishment affect the other members of the group?
11. Why do Tsukuru and Kuro say that they may be partly responsible for Shiro’s murder? Do you believe that the group did the right thing by protecting Shiro? Why or why not?
12. The Franz Liszt song "Le mal du pays" is a recurring motif in the novel. Shiro plays the song on the piano; Haida leaves a recording of it behind; Tsukuru listens to it again and again; Kuro also has a recording. Why might the author have chosen to include this song in particular in the story? What effect does its repetition have on the reader—and the characters in the novel?
13. Sara tells Tsukuru: "You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them" (44). What does she mean by this? Do you agree with her statement?
14. Kuro says that she believes an evil spirit had inhabited Shiro, and as Tsukuru is leaving her home, Kuro tells him not to let the bad elves get him. Elsewhere in the story, the piano player asks Haida’s father whether he believes in a devil. Does the novel seem to indicate whether there is such a thing as evil—existing apart from mankind, or is darkness characterized as an innate part of man’s psyche?
15. While visiting Kuro, Tsukuru comes to the realization "One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds" (322). This, he says, "is what lies at the root of true harmony." What does he mean by this? Do you agree with his statement?
16. Why does Tsukuru seem to be so interested in railroad stations? How does his interest in these stations affect his relationship with his high school friends? Later in his life, how does this interest affect his understanding of friendship and relationships? The author revisits Tsukuru’s interest in railroad stations at the end of the book and refers to the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subways in 1995 great disaster of 3/11 in Japan. Why do you think that Murakami makes mention of this incident? Does this reference change your interpretation of the story?
17. Is Tsukuru’s decision with respect to Sara at the end of the story indicative of some kind of personal progress? What is significant about his gesture? How has Tsukuru changed by the story’s end? Do you believe that the final scene provides sufficient resolution of the issues raised at the start of the story? Does it matter that readers are not ultimately privy to Sara’s response to Tsukuru’s gesture?
18. Tsukuru wishes that he had told Kuro, "Not everything was lost in the flow of time" (385). What does he believe was preserved although time has gone by? What did the members of the group ultimately gain through their friendship despite their split?
19. How does Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki compare to Haruki Murakami’s earlier novels? What themes do the works share? What elements of Murakami’s latest novel are different or unexpected?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Use a numeral "one" not upper-case "I" ...
Not to worry ... it's an easy mistake.
The Sound of Things Falling
Juan Gabriel Vasquez, 2011; Anne McClean, trans., 2013
Penguin Group USA
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594487484
Summary
From a global literary star comes a prize-winning tour de force an intimate portrayal of the drug wars in Colombia.
Juan Gabriel Vasquez has been hailed not only as one of South America’s greatest literary stars, but also as one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. In this gorgeously wrought, award-winning novel, Vasquez confronts the history of his home country, Colombia.
In the city of Bogota, Antonio Yammara reads an article about a hippo that had escaped from a derelict zoo once owned by legendary Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The article transports Antonio back to when the war between Escobar’s Medellín cartel and government forces played out violently in Colombia’s streets and in the skies above.
Back then, Antonio witnessed a friend’s murder, an event that haunts him still. As he investigates, he discovers the many ways in which his own life and his friend’s family have been shaped by his country’s recent violent past. His journey leads him all the way back to the 1960s and a world on the brink of change: a time before narco-trafficking trapped a whole generation in a living nightmare.
Vasquez is “one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature,” according to Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, and The Sound of Things Falling is his most personal, most contemporary novel to date, a masterpiece that takes his writing—and will take his literary star—even higher. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Where—Bogota, Columbia
• Education—J.D., University of Rosario; Ph.D.,
Sorbonne University
• Awards—Premio Alfaguara de Novela; Roger
Caillois Award (France)
• Currently—lives in Bogota
Juan Gabriel Vasquez is a Colombian writer and the author, most recently, of The Sound of Things Falling.
Vasquez studied Law in his native city, at the University of Rosario in Bogota, and after graduating left to France, where he lived in París from 1996 to 1999. There, at the Sorbonne, he received a doctorate in Latin American Literature. Later he moved to a small town in the Ardennes in Belgium. After living there for a year, he moved to Barcelona, where he resided until 2012. Today he lives in Bogota.
Vasquez is the author of three "official" novels — The Informers (2004), The Secret History of Costaguana, (2007) and The Sound of Things Falling (2011; U.S. transl, 2013). He wrote two others, which he prefers to ignore, when he was 23 and 25 years old: "I would like to leave this part of my past forgotten. I have this right," he has said.
Even though he recognizes a debt to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his work is a reaction to magical realism, saying this with regard to The Secret History of Costaguana:
I want to forget this absurd rhetoric of Latin America as a magical or marvellous continent. In my novel there is a disproportionate reality, but that which is disproportionate in it is the violence and cruelty of our history and of our politics.... I can say that reading One Hundred Years...in my adolesence contributed much to my vocation, but I believe that all of the side of magical realism is the least interesting part of this novel.... Like all grand novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude requires us to reinvent the truth. I believe that this reinvention is to make us lose ourselves in the magical realism. And what I have tried to make in my novel is to recount the 19th Century Colombian story in a radically distinct key and I fear to oppose what Colombians have read until now.
Vasquez also writes essays and is a weekly columnist in the Colombian newspaper, El Espectador. His stories have appeared in anthologies in different countries and his novels have been translated to various languages. Furthermore, he himself has translated works of John Hersey, Victor Hugo, and E. M. Forster, among others. He was part of the jury of 81 Latin American and Spanish writers and critics who in 2007 elected for the Colombian review, Semana, the best 100 books in the Castilian language in the last 25 years. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/18/1213.)
Book Reviews
Juan Gabriel Vasquez's brilliant new novel rejects the vivid colors and mythical transformations of [Garcia Marquez's] Caribbean masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, in favor of the cold, bitter poetry of Bogota and the hushed intensity of young married love…A gripping novel, absorbing right to the end…The Sound of Things Falling...[is] also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in translation, the superb quality of Vasquez's prose is evident, captured in Anne McLean's idiomatic English version. All the novel's characters are well imagined, original and rounded. Bogota and the Colombian countryside are beautifully if grimly described.
Edmund White - New York Times Book Reivew
Like Bolano, [Vasquez] is a master stylist and a virtuoso of patient pacing and intricate structure, and he uses the novel for much the same purpose that Bolaño did: to map the deep, cascading damage done to our world by greed and violence and to concede that even love can’t repair it.
Lev Grossman - Time
Vasquez creates characters whose memories resonate powerfully across an ingeniously interlocking structure.... Vasquez creates a compelling literary work—one where an engaging narrative envelops poignant memories of a fraught historical period
New Republic
Quietly elegant… Vasquez is a resourceful storyteller. Scenes and dialogue shine with well-chosen details. His theme echoes compellingly through family parallels, ill-fated flights and even a recurring hippo motif. He shrugs off the long shadow of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with a gritty realism that has its own persuasive magic.
Bloomberg News
If you only read one book this month...
Esquire
(Starred review.) [T]his book is an exploration of the ways in which stories profoundly impact lives.... Yammara befriends enigmatic stranger Ricardo Laverde. One night, assassins on motorbikes open fire on the two, killing Laverde and seriously wounding Yammara.... Yammara eventually finds Laverde’s daughter....Together they lose themselves in stories of Laverde’s childhood....and as the puzzle of Laverde is pieced together, Yammara comes to realize just how thoroughly the stories of these other people are part of his own.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) In this latest from Vasquez, law professor Antonio Yammara recalls befriending retired pilot and former convict Ricardo Laverde, who is later killed in a shooting in which Yammara is seriously wounded. The murder propels an extensive inquiry into Laverde's background.... Only near the very end do we discover Laverde's involvement in one of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar's drug cartels. Yet Vasquez does not emphasize the drug trafficking, instead focusing on poor choices and the role of memory in the retelling of events: "reality [is] adjusted to the memory we have of it." Verdict:... [a] genuine and magnificently written examination of memory's persistence.... —Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH
Library Journal
An odd coincidence leads Antonio Yammara, a law professor and narrator of this novel...deep into the mystery of personality, both his own and especially that of Ricardo Laverde, a casual acquaintance of Yammara before he was gunned down on the streets of Bogota.... Yammara is... intrigued by Laverde's murder and wants to find out the mystery behind his life. His curiosity leads him circuitously to Laverde's relationship with Elena, his American wife [and] Maya Fritts, Laverde's daughter by Elena, who fills in some of the gaps in Yammara's knowledge.... [This] ambiguous borderland where things don't quite come into coherent focus is where most of the characters remain.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.