"The Shape of the Ruins" by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean, was one of my most anticipated reads of the year, since I thoroughly enjoyed his novel The Sound of Things Falling, and something about the way Vásquez writes makes me eager to return to his fiction.

"The Shape of the Ruins" brings you on a journey though the violent history of 20th-century Colombia. It’s one of those books that is difficult to categorise. Part political thriller, part courtroom drama, part reportage, part conspiracy theory, and part personal memoir, the novel focuses on two defining murders of Liberal politicians and charismatic orators in Bogotá – the assassination of General Rafael Uribe Uribe on October 15, 1914, and the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on April 9, 1948. The book examines the conspiracy theories that exist connecting these two murders, and seems to provide a space for the unwritten, hidden, or “fragile” truths that exist in places that are not within the reach of journalists and historians.
“There are truths that are no less true due to the fact that nobody knows them. Maybe they happened in a strange place where journalists and historians can’t go. And what do we do with them? Where can we give them space to exist? Do we let them rot in inexistence, only because they weren’t able to be born into life correctly, or because they let bigger forces win? There are weak truths, Vásquez, truths that can’t be defended in the world of proven facts, newspapers and history books.”

The two catalysts of the story are Doctor Benevides, who becomes obsessed with the medical artefacts collected by his father, a very talented forensic scientist, and Carlos Carballo, a fanatic, who has organised his entire life around conspiracy theories surrounding the two famous assassinations. The author gradually gets pulled into their world, and tries to sift through the conspiracies and evidence connected to “the Bogotazo”, the violent riots that broke out in Bogotá following the assassination of Gaitán (hailed as the Colombian JFK), to arrive at some historical truth of the events. The novel also includes quotes from other authors, and photographs of some of the pieces of evidence that are relevant to the investigation.

Vásquez plays with the concept of “autofiction”, as he presents himself as the narrator of the story, and blurs the lines between reality and fiction. He contemplates the different ways it is possible to view history, and suggests that our capacity of chronicling the past is limited to our interpretation of the events, therefore, history is merely an artificially constructed story.
“There are two ways to view or contemplate what we call history: one is the accidental vision, for which history is the fateful product of an infinite chain of irrational acts, unpredictable contingencies and random events (life as unremitting chaos which we human beings try desperately to order); and the other is the conspiratorial vision, a scenario of shadows and invisible hands and eyes that spy and voices that whisper in corners, a theatre in which everything happens for a reason, accidents don’t exist and much less coincidences, and where the causes of events are silenced for reasons nobody knows.”

Vásquez ruminates on the inheritance of violence that is passed on from generation to generation of Colombians. The novel illustrates the deep political divide in Colombian society that is responsible for these repeated cycles of violence.

At first, the middle section of the book feels like a long digression from the central storyline, however, as more information is revealed, you start to realise that this section is actually an integral part of the overall narrative, and, in the final section, Vásquez manages to wrap up the story in a very moving and satisfying way.

"This Shape of the Ruins" is an intelligent, multi-layered, and engrossing journey through key moments in 20th-century Colombian history, and it’s also one of my favourite reads of the year so far.

Thank you to the publisher for a copy of this book via NetGalley.

"Or are you going to tell me that known history is the only version of things? No, please, don't be so naive. What you call history is no more than the winning story, Vasquez. Someone made that story and not others win, and that’s why we believe it today. Or rather: we believe it because it got written down, because it wasn't lost in the endless hole of words that only get said, or even worse, that aren’t even spoken, but are only thought."

This book revolves around two assassinations. In October 1914, General Rafael Uribe Uribe was hacked to death by two men wielding machetes. He was the "indisputable leader of the Liberal party, senator of the Republic of Colombia and veteran of four civil wars". Almost 34 years later, on 9 April 1948, Liberal presidential candidate (a potential Colombian JFK) Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was shot and killed by Juan Roa Sierra, who was immediately beaten to death by a mob (most notably, for this book, before anyone could learn anything about his motives or any associates he may have had).

In the first part of the book, we are gradually pulled into a world of conspiracy theories, of men whose motives we are unsure of. Benavides seems OK, but we begin to wonder - is he pulling more strings than we can see? Caraballo is obsessive, a fanatic: he sees links between the assassinations and the death of John F. Kennedy. Is he paranoid, is he mad? Is he right?

Vasquez sets himself as the narrator of the book (we learn about his previous novels, the birth of his daughters) and skilfully sets about merging fact and fiction to build a story that draws the reader in. We are presented with quotes from various Spanish-language writers (most frequently Gabriel Garcia Marquez), we are shown photographs of key moments or pieces of evidence. But we know that not everything we are being told is "fact". And this is partly the point of the book, I think. Vasquez tells us that history isn’t just "facts" - everything we call history is an interpretation of what remains after the event (the shape of the ruins).

As Vasquez gets sucked into Caraballo's orbit, I, too, found myself being sucked into the story and keen to know how this auto-fiction detective thriller was going to play out.

For me, things took a bit of a down turn just over a third of the way through. At this point, the narrative switches to a prolonged (I want to say interminable) description of Uribe’s assassination. It is an important part of the book, but it lasts for at least 200 pages (feels like more) and the book is only just recovering from it when it reaches the final page. I would be the first to acknowledge that my reaction might be completely different were I Colombian and more invested in the history being told.

Be that as it may, this is, overall, a fascinating novel that intertwines two key events and investigates the political machinations of a country that I know very little about.

"It’s another turn of the screw in the relationship between history and the novel. The novel is becoming the great instrument of historical speculation."

Having recently re-read DeLillo's Libra and Munoz Molina's Like a Fading Shadow, I find myself agreeing! Much of this is an engrossing story and it’s only my struggle with the length of the middle section that makes me mark it down.

This is a marvellous book but, strangely for me, it's hard to put my finger precisely on what makes it so powerful and, ultimately, moving. Straddling that contested area between fact and fiction, where the narrator shares the name of the author, this certainly has the postmodern feel of Eco's [book:Foucault's Pendulum|295873] crossed with the historical self-consciousness of Binet's [book:HHhH|17118721]. I'm confident that readers better versed in Latin American literature than I am will spot other influences and literary relationships.

On one level this narrates key episodes in the C20th history of Columbia via, especially, two assassinations of Leftist leaders. Alongside this, however, are richer veins that meditate on history and story-telling, on the interpenetration of past and present, on inheritances in personal, national and even wider terms.

Vásquez writes unflashy, precise and intelligent prose (a shout-out, too, to the translator) and the stories that unfurl are quietly gripping. Inevitably, this isn't linear but Vásquez keeps his histories circulating through levels of narratives, stories embedded within stories, not doing that cheap trick of flitting around between time periods that every other novel seems to perform.

The way this is put together is masterful as we finally, along with the narrator, see the shape of the book we've been reading. But it's also exceptional at the local level: 'they are simply human remains, ruins, yes, the ruins of noble men.'

Deeply political, deeply humane, deeply literary - a nexus of ideas meld together to form a narrative of distinction and significance. In some ways the conclusion could be profoundly pessimistic: 'because nothing has changed here in centuries of existence and never will change' - and yet the very power of words serves to undermine that desolation: 'he wanted me to make a mausoleum of words where his father could dwell, and he also wanted the last two hours his father lived to be documented just as he understood them, because that way his father would not just have a place in the world, but would have played a part in history'.