The Informers

In 1988 the Colombian journalist Gabriel Santoro published his first book, a biography of Sara Guterman, a longtime family friend of Jewish descent who fled Nazi Germany along with her parents in the mid 1930s. He is surprised to read a scathing review of the book in a national newspaper, which demeans both the book and its author. However, the most shocking revelation is that the anonymous author of this review is his father, Gabriel Sr., a respected law professor in Bogotá, who refuses to reveal his motivations for writing this review.

Gabriel Jr. turns to Sara, and he discovers a forgotten and hidden history of the Colombian government's treatment of its citizens and visitors of German, Italian and Japanese descent during World War show more II. Sara's family owns a hotel that caters to Europeans, particularly Germans, who are divided between Nazi sympathizers, Jewish emigres, and opponents of National Socialism. Colombian citizens are encouraged to report Germans who are suspected of supporting their government, and hundreds were blacklisted and stripped of their livelihood and wealth, often based on hearsay and personal vendettas.

As Gabriel learns more about these blacklists and the effect a treacherous act had upon his father and Sara, we are treated to a rich history about mid-20th century Colombian society and the effect that World War II had upon its citizens, which continue to affect the country today.

The Informers is a well constructed novel, as Vásquez, through Gabriel Jr., methodically peels away layers of his family's and country's history to uncover harsh and unflattering truths. All of the major characters are memorable and well drawn, and the narration is deliberate but compelling. I definitely recommend this novel, and I look forward to his next one, The Secret History of Costaguana, which will be published in the UK next month. show less

Juan Gabriel Vásquez makes his title plural, because the informers are everywhere in this interesting and self-reflective novel. The author plays himself, so to speak, in writing this book, and the narrative taking up the first three quarters poses as a book which has been published. However, there is very nearly nothing we can consider meta-fictional here; Sr. Vásquez plays this very straight. The result is entertaining, thought-provoking, and full of cautionary lessons.

Sr. Vásquez uses the voice of a Colombian journalist who has written a book about the life of Sara, his immigrant friend. Sara moved to Bogotá in 1938 from Germany with her prosperous Jewish family, and has lived there ever since. She became friends with Gabriel show more Santoro, prominent attorney and language professor. Santoro’s son, also called Gabriel, is our narrator-journalist. Santoro senior reads his son’s book and writes a prompt and excoriating review. We very gradually learn the reasons for the hostility, and they stem from the elder man’s guilt about something he apparently said about an acquaintance, an immigrant man from Germany, during World War II. He informed. The result is a blacklisting of the acquaintance-victim, Konrad Deresser, who is detained, imprisoned, loses his family and his business, and at war’s end, commits suicide.

This bit of character assassination starts the dominoes falling, and it takes more than fifty years for all the effects to be felt.

The author takes up the immorality of calumny very effectively: the perpetrator destroys his victim, and lives with his guilt for decades. Even as he becomes a prominent professor and rhetorician, his words and his acquaintances betray him. Eventually we aren’t sure whether he’s killed himself or not. The moral territory is crystal clear and the language engaging and seamlessly translated. This book abounds in subtleties: the snitch becomes a jurist-rhetorician; the son becomes a truth-seeking journalist who inadvertently brings ruin to the father. Well-written and throught-provoking.

http://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-informers-by-juan-gabriel-vasquez... show less

I am usually a fan but this one never quite managed to keep my interest. The problem, I think, is structural because the voice, the writing, the story are all quite good. Son publishes an oral history/biography of a close family friend whose family fled Germany before World War II. Father, a famous figure, pans his son’s book viciously and with no explanation. That’s the frame story surrounding a series of interrelated stories connected with the son’s investigation into why his father acted as he did. Of course, the story is far more complex than first appears but the narrator is so self-absorbed that long stretches challenge the reader’s interest and willingness to continue. There is much—too much—on the wartime and postwar show more history of the German community in Colombia, redeemed only by Vásquez’s undeniable talent. A lot of effort for fairly small gain on subjects of personal and collective memory: what one (and one’s community) remembers and forgets…or chooses to remember and forget. (There is a much more concise, much more moving reminiscence of a very similar issue, “The Great Forgetting” in Spain, to be found in this blog essay.) show less

One of the many reasons for reading literature in translation is the window it can provide onto experiences other than our own, sometimes experiences we never knew existed. The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez provides a window on life among German nationals living in Columbia during the second world war. Because of diplomatic pressure from the United States, the government of Columbia published a list of German nationals deemed security risks. Many of these men were arrested and confined for the duration of the war. After their release, they were not allowed to work in certain areas for several years. Many lost their livelihoods, their homes, the families; some lost their lives.

In the chaos of the early days of the war, many German show more nationals were added to the list whether or not they were fascists, supporters of fascists, even Jewish. In the hotel that served as a prison, it was not uncommon to find Jewish men and Nazi party members sitting poolside waiting for a friend or family member to arrange their freedom.

This event provides the background for Mr. Gabriel Vasquez's look at the nature of informing and its consequences. Mr. Gabriel Vasquez is not really interested in the ins and outs of these arrests but in those who informed and what happened to them. The novel's narrator, Gabriel Santoro, is a Columbian author of German descent. His own father was not imprisoned during the second world war but many of his peers were. After Gabriel Santoro published a book based on interviews with a family friend about her family's experience as German Jews living in Columbia during the war, his father refuses to speak with him for many years. His father sees this act as a betrayal, a revelation of family secrets best kept quiet. Why bring up the past? No one is interested anymore.

In a sense the younger Santoro has informed against his father, though he does not know it yet. Years later, the two reconcile after the father suffers a near fatal heart attack only to die six months later in an automobile accident. After his father's death, Gabriel finds out that he once informed against an innocent family friend. While Gabriel's father survived the war unarrested, the family friend was unable to find a way off of the government's list and consequently lost everything. In the end, he killed himself.

While there are several thriller like elements in The Informers, what makes it an interesting novel is this look at the nature of informing and its consequences. Gabriel's father informs on a friend to escape prison. Gabriel informs on a friend to publish a book. Later, a television crew will inform on them both for a sensational story. All three acts have complicated consequences, some generational. In the end, the reader must ask himself just how much should have been kept quiet. Are we really better off knowing? show less

If someone mentions South America and Nazis, what comes to mind? For many, it's the seemingly ubiquitous idea of Nazis escaping there after the war. While the concept has at least a few kernels of truth, it ignores or pushes aside events that swept up Latin America during the war.

South American writers, though, recognize that even if their nations were not combatants, they were not immune from the effects of Nazism and World War II. Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, in fact, created a fictional encyclopedia of ultra right-wing writers in North, Central and South America with his Nazi Literature in the Americas. More directly addressing the topic is The Informers, the first novel of Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez translated into show more English.

The Informers is inspired by a woman of German-Jewish origin Vásquez met in late 1999 who emigrated to Colombia with her family as a teenager in 1938. In Vásquez's hands, she becomes Sara Guterman, the subject of a book written by Gabriel Santoro, a young Bogotá writer whose father of the same name is a nationally recognized and honored professor of rhetoric. Like her real life counterpart, Guterman's family moves to Colombia in the 1930s as her German Jewish parents fled Nazism. She becomes a lifelong friend of the senior Santoro.

In telling Guterman's story, Santoro fils also examines the impact of the "Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals," a list announced by the U.S. Government of some 1,800 individuals and entities in Latin American "deemed to be acting for the benefit of Germany and Italy." That list became the basis of blacklists in Colombia, with people informing on others, usually with German or Jewish backgrounds, for real or unfounded suspicion or out of self-interest. Many end up in internment camps in Colombia and, in fact, a number of Latin Americans were sent to the United States for internment. The senior Santoro tells his students there were "thousands of people who accused, who denounced, who informed." He teaches that "the system of blacklists gave power to the weak, and the weak are a majority. That was life during those years: a dictatorship of weakness. The dictatorship of resentment[.]"

Despite those comments and the fact he also teaches lawyers and judges, Santoro père disparages his son's book in a published review. Not only does he downplay its discussion of the blacklist years, he calls the book a "failure" and says listing its shortcomings "would be as futile as it would be exhausting." Father and son do not speak for three years after that.

The senior Santoro breaks the silence when he contacts his son to tell him he is facing a life-threatening health condition. The two begin to reconcile and when father survives the health scare, he views it as a new chance at life. While he at some point apologizes for the review, he never truly explains his reasons for it. After several months, though, the senior Santoro dies in a car accident. Before and after his father's death, with information provided by Guterman and his father's girlfriend (his own informers), Santoro begins to peel away layers of silence, misdirection and falsity to reveal a secret his father hid for decades and that explain his hostility to the book.

Anne McLean translates Vásquez's generally artful prose, with the latter being an author who doesn't indulge in trite metaphor. To the contrary, Santoro senior's "breathing whistled like a paper kite" and "the notion of his past bothered him like a raspberry seed stuck in his teeth." While the younger Santoro narrates the book, Vásquez is not tied to a single traditional narrative style. One part of The Informers is the first chapter of Sanotoro's book about Guterman. Other parts are almost transcript-like versions of interviews and yet another is basically a recording of a conversation between the younger Santoro and Guterman, consisting of lengthy passages of Guterman's recollection of events before and during the blacklist era. Some readers may see the changing formats format extending a slowly unfolding structure that is already intricate but it does not become a major distraction. Perhaps more noticeable is that the younger Santoro seems strangely aloof, as if viewing himself as a journalist requires him to approach the events and revelations that impact his life in that role.

The Informers, first published in translation in the U.S. in 2009 and now in a trade paper edition, doesn't limit itself to Colombia's World War II history. Electoral politics, internal armed conflict and terrorism, and the power of the drug cartels also come into play as Vásquez takes his story through some half century of Colombian history. Those items play a role in the author's own life, as the violence and unrest caused by guerrilla movements and the drug lords led him to Europe, where he now lives and writes in Barcelona. (Interestingly, Bolaño lived on the Mediterranean coast in Spain less than 50 miles from Barcelona when he wrote most of his novels.)

With The Informers, Vásquez provides another example of how literary fiction and many of its most common themes can illuminate seemingly forgotten history and its consequences. Not only do these themes help animate the story, they help engage the reader. The fact the themes explored in The Informers, such as the relationship of father and son, family secrets and betrayal, are age-old doesn't keep it from helping unfold 20th Century history.

(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie.) show less

Vasquez is a Colombian author and this novel tells the story of a very interesting historical period in Colombian history. During World War Two, the United States was very concerned about Nazi activity in South America. The U.S. State Department sent to each friendly South American government a list of suspected Nazi sympathizers among their German emigre communities and asked that the funds of these individuals be frozen. Columbia was one of these countries, and as one would imagine in such an endeavor, these lists became open to mistakes and abuse. In the end, many Germans who in fact had left Germany for South America for the express purpose of escaping Nazism found themselves on this list. Several years of having assets frozen of show more course meant that businesses went under and individuals went bankrupt.

OK, that's the backround. The Informers is told in retrospect from the point of view of an adult son trying to get a handle on his father, a prominent teacher and jurist. When the protagonist writes a book about the war years, his father publishes a savagely negative review of the book. This sets off a process through which the narrator seeks to learn the source of his father's anger, and slowly he learns new truths about his father's past.

Much of the novel is recounted through conversations, either those we are shown directly or those the narrator describes for us in retrospect. There is much of this: people sitting down and relating long, long stories about their experiences and memories. Between this aspect of the narrative and the early exposition of the narrator's history and relations with his father, the prose very quickly (and very frequently) reminded me of Phillip Roth (if Phillip Roth had been South American).

Vasquez comes off second best in this comparison, however, because he does not have Roth's powerful ability to create magical, captivating sentences. (Whatever one may think of Roth's subject matter and storytelling, his amazingly vivid and fluid sentences have always knocked my socks off.) In Vasquez's case, this might be a case of mediocre translation. I have no idea, there.

This is a book I'm glad to have read, and I learned a lot about a slice of history I was wholly ignorant about. But in the end the story told is not quite as compelling a one as the subject matter seems to cry out for. show less

The Informers is Columbian author Juan Gabriel Vasquez first novel. It is a novel of two time frames and tells how German/Jewish immigrants to Columbia who fled the Nazi dictatorship in the late 1930's were treated with suspicion and then hostility by their Columbian hosts. There was a blacklist issued by the U.S.A. which made it impossible for those listed to earn a living, funds and property were seized and many were detained in make-ship hotel/prisons. The second time frame is the 1990's when the children of those immigrants are suffering for the guilt of their fathers who may have connived to get old enemies included on the blacklist.

The novel takes the form of a mystery as Gabriel Santoro a journalist tries to unravel the past. He show more has written a book about Sara: a Jewish survivor from the period, but from the reaction of his own father to it's publication he begins to realise that there is much that he has missed in his story. The book then takes us back to the war years and gives us Sara's story in her POV and in effect we are reading the book that Santoro has written. The mystery slowly unfolds, but one of the main themes of the novel is the inaccuracy of memories, either from forgetfulness or a more deliberate attempt to bury the actions of the past. Santoro questions his own role as a journalist/author and realises how the past particularly his fathers actions have affected his own life. The mystery becomes his mystery the guilt is his guilt.

Once again the setting in Bogota and then in Medellin is carefully crafted and after reading a couple of Vasquez books I am certainly aware of the geography of the country and its politics and have more than a vague idea of the journey between rainy misty Bogota and hot sweltering Medellin. There are plenty of similarities between Vasquez later novel [The Sound of Things Falling] and The Informers; both do an excellent job of weaving Columbia's turbulent history in with the plot and the characterisations, both are concerned with uncovering crimes from the past and how these affect the current generation, journals and letters from the past provide key pieces of information and the reliability of memory and artefacts are questioned.

A good novel, but if you have already read [The Sound of Things Falling] you might not want to revisit some of the same ground, however if you enjoyed either one of the novels then the chances are you will like them both. I have read two novels by Vasquez and as it is my turn to chose out next reads for the book club I will not be choosing a third by him. 3.5 stars. show less