I’d never heard of Juan Gabriel Vásquez, but the New York Times has called him the successor to Gabriel García Márquez, the new “grandmaster” of Colombian writers. A friend recommended Reputations to me, and I’m glad that she did. She refuses to read long novels, and Reputations is a short novel. Were you so minded you could read it three or four times on a flight from Paris to Bogota.
Mallarino, the central character, is a political cartoonist, and every morning he scans the newspapers, selects a story, and draws his cartoon. He’s done it for forty years, and it’s the highlight of his day. Vásquez describes well the joy and intensity of creation:
“It was, and would go on being for a long time, the happiest moment of the day: a half-hour, or a whole one, or two, when nothing existed outside the friendly rectangle of card and the world that was being born within it, invented or cast by the lines and marks, by the to and fro of Indian ink. During those minutes Mallarino even forgot the indignation or irritation or mere anti-establishment impatience that had given rise to the drawing in the first place, and all his attention, just as happened in the middle of sex, concentrated on an attractive form – a pair of ears, an exaggerated set of teeth, a lock of hair, a deliberately ridiculous bow tie – outside of which nothing else existed. It was total abandonment.”
The novel begins with Mallarino preparing to receive a major prize. His reputation is secure, but he is also “a sniper of other people’s reputations.” Almost 30 years before he published a cartoon of a politician that led to the politician killing himself. He had destroyed the politician’s reputation. Mallarino had published many cartoons of the politician before, but the one that finally shattered the politician’s reputation was based on an incident in Mallarino’s own house. He had seized on the politician’s humiliation.
“A cartoonist] see the world through the humiliations of others; those who seek out weaknesses in others – bones, cartilages – and pounce to exploit them, the way dogs smell fear….All humiliation, needs a witness. It doesn’t exist without it: nobody is humiliated alone: humiliation in solitude is not humiliation.”
Mallarino had taken the humiliation that arose on his own home and shared it with the nation.
But what actually happened was unclear and remains unclear in the novel. But the arrival of a visitor to Mallarino’s home heralds a journey to find the widow of the politician to try and find out what really happened. But he runs a risk in doing so, it may become apparent that the politician hadn’t done anything wrong and that Mallarino had driven him to suicide based on nothing. Mallarino’s editor warns him not to try and find out what happened. His reputation might be destroyed, and, warns the editor:
“Can you imagine what the beasts could do with that? Can you imagine what will happen when the beasts realize they can cut your head off? And for something that happened so long ago, besides. Do you think they’re going to spare you? Well, they’re not. They’re going to cut off your head, the beasts of this beastly country are going to cut your head off. Everyone who hates you, who hates us, all the fanatics are going to go for the jugular.”
We never find out what happened, but we do feel that Mallarino may be nearing his end. Perhaps he will even kill himself as did Ricardo Rendón, a former great [and real] Colombian cartoonist did?
There is much fine writing in the book. Vasquez writes in straightforward, unflowery prose, and Anne McLean’s translation reads well. The novel reads as if it could have been written in English.
I took what I thought of as a short short story (52 words) from the novel, and I’ve taken other quotes, https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2024/05/09/a-beautiful-short-story-of-52-words-it-might-be-entitled-a-man-goes-to-the-doctor/ including a convincing account of how it is that lovers and couples come apart.
Quotes from Reputations by
Cartoons and cartooning
His political cartoons had turned him into what Rendón had been in the 1930s: a moral authority for half the country, public enemy number one for the other half, and for all of them a man able to cause the repeal of a law, overturn a judge’s decision, bring down a mayor or seriously threaten the stability of a ministry, and all this with no other weapons than paper and Indian ink.
Cartoons are like fish: if they’re not used today, they can’t be used tomorrow.’
Political cartoons might exaggerate reality, but they can’t invent it. They can distort, but never lie.’
[The best cartoon is] “a stinger dipped in honey.” (True as well of letter of complaint or protest.)
I am a satirical illustrator. It has its risks as well, of course. The risk of turning into a social analgesic: the things I draw become more comprehensible, more easily assimilated. It hurts us less to confront them. I don’t want my drawings to do that, of course I don’t. But I’m not sure it can be avoided.’
[
We create cartoons of ourselves to live by
Life is the best caricaturist. Life turns us into caricatures of ourselves. You have, we all have, the obligation to make the best caricature possible, to camouflage what we don’t like and exalt what we like best.
Memory and the past
What a strange thing memory is, allowing us to remember what we have not experienced.
Mallarino imagined the past as a watery creature with imprecise contours, a sort of deceitful, dishonest amoeba that can’t be investigated, for, looking for it again under the microscope, we find that it’s not there, and we suspect that it’s gone, and we soon realize that it has changed shape and is now impossible to recognize.
How lovers and married couples come apart
And now they were splitting up, they too were worn down by the diverse strategies life has to wear lovers down, too many trips or too much togetherness, the accumulated weight of lies or stupidity or lack of tact or mistakes, the things said at the wrong time and with immoderate or inappropriate words or those which, perhaps not finding appropriate or moderate words, were never said, or worn down too by a bad memory, yes, by the inability to remember what’s essential and live within it (to remember what once made the other happy: how many lovers had succumbed to that negligent forgetting), and by the inability, as well, to get ahead of all that wearing down and deterioration, get ahead of the lies, the stupidity, the lack of tact, the mistakes, the things that shouldn’t be said and the silences that should be avoided: to see all that, see it all coming from way off, see it coming and step aside and feel it blow past like a meteorite grazing the planet.
Observations
That two-humped monster called a couple
No one can afford doubt these days, Javier. This is not a world for doubters.
Richard Smith's non-medical blogs 