Bloomsbury Home
- Home
- FICTION
- General & Literary Fiction
- Reputations
You must sign in to add this item to your wishlist. Please sign in or create an account
Description
As Colombia's famed political cartoonist, Javier Mallarino, strolls through downtown Bogotá in the hours before a public celebration of his career in the grand Teatro Colón, he contemplates the start of his professional life, and how he set down his oils and took up a pen to begin drawing caricatures for a living. But the celebration has far-reaching consequences: as he leaves the theatre a figure from his past, now a young woman, emerges from the crowd outside and forces Mallarino to confront an incident that took place in his home half a lifetime ago, calling into question his reputation and the value of his life's work.
Vásquez's terse, poetic prose contrasts starkly with the intense and sharply focused content of this beautifully structured novel. Questioning the power of memory and the media, and their ability to distort, inform and destroy, Vásquez plays with the past and the present, challenging our perception of the truth.
Product details
Published | May 19 2016 |
---|---|
Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
Edition | 1st |
Extent | 192 |
ISBN | 9781408852873 |
Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
-
Vasquez's prose, translated by Anne MacLean, is spare and effective, with a pleasing precision … A strong writer with a compelling vision
Guardian
-
An affecting, carefully paced work of psychological realism
Times Literary Supplement
-
A masterful writer
Nicole Krauss
-
A thrilling new discovery
Colm Tóibín
-
This is a magnificent novel, short and dense, whose three parts are calibrated to the millimetre
Le Monde
-
This is a powerfully written novella and Vásquez's prose, as always, has a stark elegance that lends it weight
Frank Wynne