Juan Gabriel Vásquez' Songs for the Flames offers a collection of stories that are at once both beautiful and distressing. He's one of those writers whose prose style makes readers want to highlight passages (and kudos to the translator):

"the sparse grass that grew unconvincingly on the bank"

"Monica Lewinsky, an intern who didn't smoke cigars"

"All sorts of stupid metaphors went through my head about this proximity, but I had the good sense not to write any of them down in my notebook," from a story about a writer who briefly becomes an extra in a Johnny Depp film.

The settings for Vásquez's stories vary widely: city, village, Colombia (Vásquez' homeland), France, Spain. The situations he explores are compelling: the life of a deserter from Colombian soldiers heading off to fight for "freedom" in the Korean War; two very different tellings of an army wife, living in a U.S. base in Spain, being informed of her husband's death; an increasingly brutal series of fights among a group of boys as violence builds in Colombia; a family corrido band facing increasing tensions along generational lines.

Even if you are not a frequent reader of short stories (quite frankly, I not), this is a book worth seeking out. Time reading Songs for the Flames is time well spent. I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher; the opinions are my own. ( )

Der bekannte kolumbianische Romancier (vgl. "Die Gestalt der Ruinen", ID-B 38/18) gibt in seiner Kurzprosa denen eine Stimme, deren Leben von einer weitreichenden Lüge oder einem Geheimnis belastet ist. Der Überbringer der Todesnachricht des Hubschrauberpiloten Peter Semones in "Schlechte Nachrichten" verführt die Witwe und macht sich aus dem Staub, ohne die Botschaft zu überbringen. Bei einer Gedenkveranstaltung der Veteranen, die in Korea kämpften, trifft der Erzähler die Frau eines hochrangigen Offiziers wieder, mit der ihn seit 50 Jahren ein Geheimnis verbindet ("Die Frösche"). Die titelgebende, sehr berührende Erzählung umfasst die dramatische Familiengeschichte des Generals Rafael Uribe Uribe, nachdem in Bogotá ein Stadtteil benannt ist und der als liberaler Politiker Kolumbien verändert hat. In "Der Doppelgänger" leidet ein Vater am Tod des Sohnes, der bei einem Manöver ums Leben kam, und macht dessen besten Freund und Schulkameraden dafür verantwortlich. - Vásquez blickt in die Tiefe der menschlichen Seele und findet Worte für ihren großen Schmerz. Ab mittleren Beständen sehr empfohlen. ( )

As you would expect, Vásquez keeps coming back in these stories to Colombia's violent history and the traces it leaves on people's lives. The title story, which is also the longest in the collection, is a kind of bonus chapter to La forma de las ruinas, a story he came across after finishing that book, of a radical young woman journalist whose family were friends of the murdered politician Rafael Uribe Uribe. In other stories he picks up on Colombians who fought in the Korean War, on a group of boys in a suburban Bogota neighbourhood whose values are turned upside-down by the violence around them, on a politician's personal assistant hurt in an accident, or on a Colombian investment consultant who tries and fails to run away to a new life.

There often seems to be an element of questioning the authority of the narrator(s) — the person telling us the story is involved in some way, and has often betrayed or misled other characters in the story. Even when the scene moves outside Colombia, it is the failings of the narrator that we focus on, both in "Aeropuerto" where the author gets a day's work as an extra in Polanski's The ninth gate and ends up distracted by thoughts of the Sharon Tate murder and learning little or nothing about the legendary director from his first-hand experience, and in "El ultimo corrido," where he is a journalist attached to a Mexican band on tour and almost fails to dig out the really important story about the band.

The subjects of these stories may be fairly uniformly depressing, but Vásquez is a lively, concise writer, good at drawing the reader in to the world he is writing about, and you come out with the feeling that you now understand a lot more about Latin America, particularly about Colombia, than he has actually told you. ( )