What is a novel, anyway? In its most common form, a book-length made-up story, though with the recent rise of autofiction, readers have become used to the line between life and art being blurred. Look back a little further and you’ll find many writers playing with the idea of the “nonfiction novel”, most famously Truman Capote with In Cold Blood: in the right hands, novels are clearly flexible enough to deal in facts.
That’s the territory we find ourselves in here. Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s eighth novel explores the life story of living Colombian film director Sergio Cabrera, director of Time Out, Ilona Arrives With the Rain, The Strategy of the Snail and many others. Vásquez uses as a framing device a 2016 retrospective of Cabrera’s films held in Barcelona, at which time Cabrera’s father, who acted in many of his films, had just died, and his marriage was faltering: exactly the kind of moment at which many of us would look back and try to make sense of our lives.
“The act of fiction has been to extract the figure of this novel from the huge mountain of Sergio Cabrera’s experience and that of his family, as he revealed them to me over seven years of encounters and more than 30 hours of recorded conversations,” explains Vásquez in an author’s note, adding that he also spoke at length to Cabrera’s sister, Marianella, and had access to diaries, family friends and other source material from the Cabrera family’s archive.
And what a life story it is. Fittingly, Vásquez opens the novel (transparently translated by Anne McLean) in Barcelona, during the Spanish civil war, where Cabrera’s father, Fausto, is sheltering from bombs. We follow the family as they flee, first to France and then to the Dominican Republic, where Fausto, against all odds, becomes an actor, briefly meets the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, and, in 1945, with Hitler and Mussolini dead but Franco very much alive, arrives in Bogotá where he falls in love with a high-born young woman called Luz Elena. They marry in 1947, just as Colombia descends into “la Violencia”, a period of bipartisan civil unrest that claimed up to 300,000 lives and became the flame from which the Cabrera family’s activism was kindled.
In 1954 television comes to Colombia and Fausto begins an apprenticeship under revered Japanese actor and director Seki Sano. He is exposed to Sano’s Marxist ideas, and when a family friend gets in touch to say that the Foreign Languages Institute in Peking is seeking Spanish teachers, he uproots Luz Elena, a teenage Sergio and his younger sister Marianella and takes them to China. After some years in which they become fluent in Chinese and quickly learn to politically and culturally conform, the two children are left to fend for themselves, fortified only by Fausto’s written set of instructions in communist principles.
The fact that a Colombian teenager destined to become a lauded film director first became a Red Guard in Mao’s China is astonishing, as is the fact that, when summoned home to find both parents working undercover for the revolution, both Sergio and his younger sister become guerrilla fighters, convinced, as few are today, that the world order could successfully be overturned, and willing to die to bring it about. The story of their political indoctrination, active deployment, growing unease and ultimate disillusionment is both fascinating and terrifying, and many today will recognise in it the tendency of the left to prioritise ideological purity over concrete action, get lost in the weeds of theory and language, and ultimately turn on itself. It’s hardly a surprise that when Marianella leaves the Popular Liberation Army it is with a bullet in her back.
Given the richness of the source material it’s disappointing that large parts of Cabrera’s life story really drag. “Retrospective is a work of fiction, but there are no imaginary episodes in it,” Vásquez states; however, not only has he not made anything up, he seems to have left nothing out. Something happens, and then another thing happens, and then another thing happens, all minutely described and at a similar emotional pitch: yet in novels, episodes must earn their place, either contributing to the development of the plot or to the delineation of character – or, preferably, both. And although Vásquez does invent some dialogue for his real-life characters, we are never fully inside their consciousnesses: the events of their lives, both large and small, flicker and glow at a historical remove, as though we are watching a magic lantern show. It would have helped to have had more time in 2016 scattered through the narrative, to break it up; it would also have helped to have had some of the more minor details passed over, in the service of pace.
Retrospective is a dogged and conscientious account of a family whose lives have been bound up in some of Europe’s key historical moments, but it lacks the pliancy and texture of, say, Keggie Carew’s moving and compelling story of her extraordinary father, Dadland, which was rightly billed as memoir. While undoubtedly an achievement in its ordering of history, is Retrospective a novel? Not in my book. A memoir-by-proxy? Yes, perhaps.
• Retrospective by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, translated by Anne McLean, is published by MacLehose Press (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
