MixedThe Financial Times... even as he tracks his great-uncle to the north of Spain, Cercas never loses sight of their home town, a place whose hatreds and bloodletting become a microcosm of the madness engulfing the country ... The writing in Lord of All the Dead occasionally does justice to its Homeric muse, but all too often exasperates. Cercas has an undeniable knack for zoning in on a tiny ember of the past, which he then manages to coax to narrative flame. But his metafictional concerns can slip into navel-gazing, at odds with his historical themes. To build his story, Cercas twists two narrative strands together ... Intended to tease out the author’s ideas on the investigation, any insights are lost in long, self-indulgent exchanges and Hollywood tittle-tattle ... Behind this even-handedness lurk some questions. A mayor would have left a considerable paper trail. So, if Cercas is writing, as he declares, \'as a historian\', might we not expect him to investigate that trail much more thoroughly? And how does the particular relate to the general? To what extent is Manuel a product of Spanish social conditions? Cercas details the near-medieval backwardness of Ibahernando, but does not fully explore how that shaped Manuel ... Cercas is surely right when he says, in interviews, that we can only understand the re-emergence of fascism if we empathise with how decent men like Manuel were sucked into it in the 1930s. But his ability to express such a noble aim is hobbled by the limitations of his auto-fictional methods, giving us history that is never quite proper history, and fiction that, in the end, isn’t really fiction either.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
PanThe Financial TimesPost-Charlie Hebdo, Vásquez’s choice of a cartoonist protagonist is an inspired one — especially in Colombia, where speaking truth to power requires considerable cojones. But the nuts and bolts of Mallarino’s art are under-specified. The examples of his satire we are given don’t ever quite seem to justify the reverence, or fear, that Mallarino’s art provokes ... instead of scrutinising the flaws in the soul of a liberal man, Reputations too often leaves it frustratingly unmapped.
