The Informers

Description

When Gabriel Santoro's biography is scathingly reviewed by his own father, a public intellectual and famous Bogotá rhetorician, Gabriel could not imagine what had pierced his icy exterior to provoke such a painful reaction. A volume that catalogues the life of Sara Guterman, a longtime family friend and Jewish immigrant, since her arrival in Colombia in the 1930s, A Life in Exile seemed a slim, innocent exercise in recording modern history. But as a devastated Gabriel delves, yet again, into Sara's story, searching for clues to his father's anger, he cannot yet see the sinister secret buried in his research that could destroy his father's exalted reputation and redefine his own. After his father's mysterious death in a car accident a few years later, Gabriel sets out anew to navigate half a century of half-truths and hidden meanings. With the help of Sara Guterman and his father's young girlfriend, Angelina, layer after shocking layer of Gabriel's world falls away and a complex portrait of his father emerges from the ruins. From the streets of 1940s Bogotá to a stranger's doorstep in 1990s Medellín, he unravels the web of doubt, betrayal, and guilt at the core of his father's life and he wades into a dark, longsilenced period of Colombian history after World War II. In achingly beautiful prose, Juan Gabriel Vásquez delivers a powerful, riveting exploration of the sins of our fathers and the inescapability of the past. A novel that has already earned Vásquez international accolades, as well as comparaisons to W.G. Sebald, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip roth, The Informers heralds the arrival of an extraordinary international talent. (front flap)

Description

When Gabriel Santoro publishes his first book, a biography of a Jewish family friend who fled Germany for Colombia shortly before World War Two, it never occurs to him that his father will write a devastating review in a national newspaper. Why does he attack him so viciously? Do the pages of his book unwittingly hide some dangerous secret? As Gabriel sets out to discover what lies behind his father's anger, he finds himself undertaking an examination of the guilt and complicity at the heart of Colombian society, as one treacherous act perpetrated in those dark days returns with a vengeance half a century on. (back cover)

Subjects

Other Editions

• The InformersPaperbackBloomsbury2009-01-01
• Los informantesAlfaguara2004-01-01
• Los informantesAlfaguara2004-01-01
• Los InformantesHardcoverAlfaguara2004-01-01
• Los InformantesHardcoverAlfaguara2006-10-01
• The InformersHardcoverBloomsbury2008-01-01