'The Shape Of The Ruins' Is Baggy, Discursive, But True At Its Core
Juan Gabriel Vásquez's new novel is packed with history, alternate history and conspiracies — though ultimately it's about neither history nor politics, but how they combine to shape one man.
The Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez resembles nobody more in his work than Philip Roth. Mid-career Roth, especially. The two share a vast array of stylistic and thematic preoccupations, and no small number of compulsions. The need to de-mythologize, for example. The desire to pick apart every impulse toward tribalism they see. The constant mining of their personal histories for the political, or the reverse. Both Roth and Vásquez like making themselves into characters,
