Reputations
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
As Colombia's famed political cartoonist, Javier Mallarino, strolls through downtown Bogotá in the hours before a public celebration of his career in the grand Teatro Colón, he contemplates the start of his professional life, and how he set down his oils and took up a pen to begin drawing caricatures for a living. But the celebration has far-reaching consequences: as he leaves the theatre a figure from his past, now a young woman, emerges from the crowd outside and forces Mallarino to confront an incident that took place in his home half a lifetime ago, calling into question his reputation and the value of his life's work.
Vásquez's terse, poetic prose contrasts starkly with the intense and sharply focused content of this beautifully structured novel. Questioning the power of memory and the media, and their ability to distort, inform and destroy, Vásquez plays with the past and the present, challenging our perception of the truth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Javier Mallarino, renowned political cartoonist, has reached the apex of his career. He's feted at a ceremony with speeches and a commemorative stamp while his estranged wife (whom he loves) watches from the audience. But a film tribute shown during the program triggers something in the memory of another woman in the audience, unraveling several lives as the past is revisited. Mallarino is forced to reexamine, through the eyes of this woman, the very basis of his reputation, an accusation of sexual misconduct he implied in a caricature that destroyed the career of a politician and eventually led to his death. Colombia's violent past has receded in this Bogot -set novel; instead the author seeks to distill the nation's collective experience into universal truths that transcend history. In McLean's translation, V squez's prose is luminous, the spooling and unspooling of his characters' thoughts convincing and powerful. One of V squez's greatest conundrums is the confluence of the public and private how little control the individual has, how easily a life is made or ruined by events or the will of others.
