'Reputations' a Technical and Moral Tour de Force

Colombian cartoonist Javier Mallarino, protagonist of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s “Reputations,” dominates his field: Powerful people fear his caricatures, average citizens know his name, and his country has honored him with its highest national award. In retrospect, the 65-year-old Mallarino seems to have built a respectable reputation and lived a respectable life. The day after the Colombian national award ceremony, however, a young woman named Samantha Leal comes to Mallarino’s Bogotá studio seeking to clarify a dark memory that occurred there decades ago. Her questions about that afternoon, which cemented Mallarino’s reputation and destabilized Leal’s life, force Mallarino to reassess the value and meaning of his entire illustrious career.

Although the novel’s premise seems too broad and heady to handle well in such a slim volume, the potent efficiency of Vásquez’s prose allows him to satisfyingly delve into all its themes. In a story spanning only two days of plot-time, Mallarino and the reader successfully confront questions such as: Should one be moral if one’s surroundings require amorality to survive? What are our responsibilities in wielding power? Who deserves the power to judge, or to dictate which truth the world remembers? Is it acceptable to claim knowledge of such subjective concepts as memories and truth? Does absolute truth—or only its consequences—matter?

The exceptionally forceful and incisive language in “Reputations” stands out as one of the novel’s most salient elements. Vásquez’s prose, as translated by Anne McLean, assuredly guides the reader from one sentence to the next with inexorable momentum. A combination of violence, sexuality, and evocations of untamed nature saturates the writing’s figurative expressions; every description heightens the novel’s tense atmosphere and looming sense of self-conflict. A seat belt crosses a woman’s breast “like a hunter’s quiver.” Reporters’ hungry pens are “erect like phalluses.” A receipt becomes tangled in a jacket pocket’s loose threads like “a fish in seaweed.” Vásquez also manages to adopt the keen eye of a cartoonist, seeing inside mechanisms and underneath bones. When Mallarino looks at his watch, for example, he does not simply read the time: He notes the “the angle of the watch hands turned down in reproach.” And the watch does not simply sit on his wrist, but rather “[rests] with the dial… at the prominence at the end of the ulna, the half sphere of bone that some people touch when they’re worried.”

Every individual in the small cast of Mallarino’s life, in fact, seems to be just as sharply reflective and clear-eyed as the cartoonist; when needed, their conversations comprise eloquent turns of phrase and monologues few people would utter spontaneously. Vásquez authoritatively wields his characters’ dialogue and the free indirect discourse of his close third-person perspective to directly express pieces of his own wisdom. A lesser writer might alienate readers through these techniques, making the characters flat or the story narrative unbearably pedantic—but Vásquez’s view of the world is so clear and compelling that he avoids both pitfalls. Just a few sentences, like elegant strokes of an India-ink pen, suffice to capture the essence of individuals, humanity, nations, and emotions. Vásquez writes of Rodrigo Valencia, the executive editor of the newspaper at which Mallarino works: “[His] voice was guttural and deep, one of those voices that give orders naturally, or whose demands are accepted without a fuss. He knew it; he’d grown accustomed to choosing the words that best suited his voice.” “A child’s memory is made of plasticine,” Leal says ruefully; “Forgetfulness was the only democratic thing in Colombia,” thinks Mallarino. These aphoristic moments embody the purpose of literature: to recreate the world in a way most of us do not possess the experience or insight to clearly see.

The book’s spareness and unflinching dissection of its own elements lead naturally to a comparison with caricature. “Life turns us into caricatures of ourselves,” Mallarino says during his award acceptance speech, at a moment in which he himself is acts out the caricature of a grandiose, eminent artist. “Reputations” could be both a powerfully told story and an irreverent self-effacement of the story medium itself, of any attempt at all, whether Mallarino’s or Vásquez’s, to capture anything resembling the truth. Despite the novel’s distrust of representation and memory, however, and despite the central themes of shortcomings and deception, “Reputations” feels driven by some terrific moral engine—or, at least, by the belief in or astounding illusion of one. The conviction with which Vásquez writes his characters and world ultimately creates the sense that perhaps, somewhere, a golden absolute exists. Somewhere—most likely, it seems, in Vásquez’s pen-—there is a semblance of surety, of understanding, of a way forward and upward and beyond.

—Staff Writer Emily Zhao can be reached at emily.zhao@thecrimson.com.