...haunting and beautiful ... if you appreciate the intelligence and ambiguities of the genre’s best practitioners, you’ll have some affinity for what Vasquez is up to here ... his notion of a literature steeped in history, one that does not so much blur as obviate the line between fiction and nonfiction, and between scholarship and imagination, may owe more to Borges than anyone else ... Songs for the Flames is a book about war and imperialism, which in Vasquez’s view never really end, but rather mutate ... a book about secrets and lies, which is to say speech acts: their tremendous power, but also the limits of that power and the wretched ecstasy of revelation.
Prodigious author, journalist, and translator Vásquez (Reputations, 2016), one of South America’s most important writers, is once again deftly translated by award-winning Canadian McLean ... Disturbing yet necessary, Vásquez’s fiction becomes enduring testimony.
Vásquez is concerned with his home country’s history, but the shorter form gives his prose a welcome tightness; each story (via McLean’s translation) is crisp and conversational. Still, he can infuse historical breadth to the short form ... A bracing set of stories about smaller traumas embedded among a country’s larger crises.
[A] bravura collection blending autofiction with stories of historical and personal trauma, each told by an unnamed Colombian novelist and journalist living in Barcelona ... Vásquez continues to distinguish himself among the finest writers from Latin America.
