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.
