The list is in charge

What power a list can have, no? That column down the left with all the letters exactly the same, all capitals, one after another, it's always fascinated me. I've always found lists enthralling, why should I deny it? There's nothing wrong in that either, I suppose, nothing reproachable. A telephone directory was the best thing I could have when I was little; I'd put my finger at the top and slide it down a page where they were all ls or ms, where they were all us. The feeling of tranquility that gives you. The feeling that there is an order to the world. Or at least that it can be put in order. Take the chaos of a hotel, for example, and you put it down on a list. I don't care if it's a list of things to do, of guests, the payroll. Everything that needs to be is there and what is not there isn't because it shouldn't be there. And you breathe easy, sure of having done things as they need to be done. Control. That's what you have when you make list; absolute control. The list is in charge. A list is a universe. What isn't in a list doesn't exist for anyone. A list is proof of the non-existence of God. I said that to Papa once and he slapped me across the face. I said it to sound interesting, a bit to see what would happen, and that's what happened, a slap. But deep down it's true.

— from The Informers, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez.

A brutal nostalgia

The second life, as everyone knows, always comes with the inconvenient obligation to correct the first one.

And later,

And then he confirmed the feeling I'd had earlier: one of the consequences of the second life was a brutal nostalgia, the notion, so very democratic, so universally accessible and at the same time so surprising, of time lost, even though we might have suffered more in that time than in the present.

I'm reading The Informers, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez — a much denser read than I'd expected, though it's only just over 300 pages. Not hard, but weighty. The narrator is slowly unpacking his relationship with his father, and his family's relationship to its community. Neither memory nor history is entirely reliable; accuracy, let alone truth, is elusive.

The setting is Colombia, a country with a politically convoluted history, and the story told here essentially starts with Jewish immigrants at the onset of WWII. Weighty.

Also,

Life likes to outdo itself.

The sound of things

I'd planned to see Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez this evening at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival, but the event has been cancelled.

Vásquez's 2007 novel The Secret History of Costaguana (published in English translation in 2010) riffs off of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, a book I've been trying to read for the last 26 years, and it occurred to me that Vásquez might be my way into that story.

His first novel, The Informers, is about Colombia's Jewish and German Immigrant populations, and The Sound of Things Falling (I love this title!), due out in English later this year, tackles the subject of the drug trade.

I'm disappointed that I won't have the chance to hear Vásquez speak (but this means I can spend the evening going over my notes in preparation for talking about Simenon on Sunday).

I'll be back at Blue Met tomorrow, and I'll be checking out the onsite bookstore for Vásquez's novels too.

Further reading

• Profile: The Guardian
• Interview: BOMB Magazine
• Review of The Informers: The Quarterly Conversation
• Review of The Secret History of Costaguana: New York Times