Reputations
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4.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the author of The Sound of Things Falling, a powerful novel about a legendary political cartoonist.
Javier Mallarino is a living legend. He is his country’s most influential political cartoonist, the conscience of a nation. A man capable of repealing laws, overturning judges’ decisions, and destroying politicians’ careers with his art. His weapons are pen and ink. Those in power fear him and pay him homage.
After four decades of a brilliant career, he’s at the height of his powers. But this all changes when he’s paid an unexpected visit by a young woman who upends his personal history and forces him to reconsider his life and work, questioning his position in the world.
In Reputations, Juan Gabriel Vásquez examines the weight of the past, how a public persona intersects with private histories, the burdens and surprises of memory. In this intimate novel, Vásquez once again brilliantly plumbs universal experiences to create a masterly story, one that reverberates long after you turn the final page.
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.
