The German experience in Colombia

Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez has written a debut novel detailing the xenophobic accusations against and hardships of German immigrants in Colombia during the second World War, blending the historical story with more recent Colombian history. Titled The Informers and translated into English by Anne McLean, the novel has been given a very positive review by Larry Rohter of The New York Times.

Running like an undercurrent through “The Informers” is the violence that has pervaded Colombian life for decades, leaving survivors with the “fleeting altruistic regret one tends to feel when listening to news of someone else’s death.” A cavalcade of assassinations, kidnappings, bombings and other terrorist attacks perpetrated by guerrillas and drug lords are mentioned in passing, so casually that when one character is asked about the death of a lover, she replies: “There was a fight and guns came out and he got shot, nothing more. The most normal thing in the world.”

Mr. Vásquez also proves adept at capturing the sense of dislocation and vertigo experienced by those forced to separate from their language and culture. Novels about immigrants have become a genre of their own in recent years, usually centered on Latin Americans or Asians trying to make their way in the United States or some other industrialized country. Here, though, the positions are reversed, and while one Nazi supporter sneers at Germans in Colombia who “wanted to assimilate” and have “done so downward,” Mr. Vásquez clearly sympathizes with those struggling to adjust.

Vásquez was born in Bogotá in 1973, and Los informantes was originally published by Alfaguara in 2004, at which time it was hailed by the Colombian magazine Semana as one of the most important novels of the past twenty years. In 2007, Vásquez published a second novel in Castilian, Historia secreta de Costaguana, which has won awards in Colombia and Spain. Having studied at the Sorbonne of France, Vásquez now lives in Barcelona, where he works in journalism, translates the works of Victor Hugo, E.M. Forster and John Hershey, and has written a brief biography of Joseph Conrad, whose style and themes often draw comparisons to his own work.