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The All Saints' Day Lovers

The All Saints' Day Lovers

by Anne McLean (Translator), Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2015

    $3.22
Synopsis

Achingly sad and beautifully crafted, The All Saints' Day Lovers is a remarkable and intense exploration of relationships, loneliness and cruelty. Set mainly in the starkly beautiful landscape of Belgium's Ardennes, these stories have been compared to Maupassant, Chekhov, John Cheever and Antonio Tabucchi. A Colombian writer is witness to a murder which will mark him forever. A woman sits alone in her house, waiting for her husband to return, while he lies in another woman's bed twenty kilometres away. Through blood-soaked betrayal, a love affair, murder and long-meditated revenge, Vasquez achieves an extraordinary unity of emotion, morality and landscape with these fragmented lives.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 256
 Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 21 May 2015
ISBN 10: 1408860406
ISBN 13: 9781408860403
Book Overview: An extraordinarily rich and powerful collection of seven, thematically linked, long stories from the acclaimed prize-winning author of The Sound of Things Falling

Media Reviews
A pervading atmosphere of melancholy, mists and rural isolation: it is this that gives the collection its powerful sense of coherence and unity ... Although the story is comfortless, there is an imaginative richness to the account of the long night these lost souls spend together ... The All Saints' Day Lovers is testimony to the early, dark brilliance of Vasquez' writing * Sunday Times *
Brilliant South American writer ... Vasquez has a wonderful eye for the ironies, lies and betrayals of love * The Times *
Beyond the simple pleasure of a well-wrought tragedy, it offers a sustained meditation on the lingering power of the unlived life - the road not taken - over the life we actually live. It's a powerful story * Guardian *
I fell under his spell. There is no better word because the effect he manages to create, and the world that he evokes, feels little short of spellbinding ... What marks out this collection is not merely the maturity of Vasquez's insights, and his ability to look at people more closely than they have ever looked at themselves, but the shaping force of his literary personality, which lies upon them all. He has a signature as bold and distinctive as a painter's, and once you have read one, you feel you would know his writing anywhere * Glasgow Herald *
Behind this action lurks a powerful, and subtle, emotional load ... In all these stories, the author employs apparently unconnected threads that eventually coalesce to great effect ... The All Saints' Day Lovers is nevertheless a forceful reminder that even in the quietest of backwaters - and they don't come much quieter than the Ardennes region in which most of these tales are set - cruelty and estrangement will have their say. This is a very readable, disturbing and entertaining look at how even the maturest of adults are capable of making an unholy mess of their lives - and those of others * Times Literary Supplement *
Author Bio
Juan Gabriel Vasquez was born in Bogota in 1973. He studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne, and has translated works by E. M. Forster and Victor Hugo, amongst others, into Spanish. His previous books have won the IMPAC Award, the Qwerty prize, the Alfaguara Prize and the Gregor von Rezzori Prize, and have been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2014 IMPAC Prize. His books have been published in sixteen languages and thirty countries. After sixteen years in France, Belgium and Spain, he now lives in Bogota. Anne McLean has translated works by many Spanish and Latin American authors including Hector Abad, Carmen Martin Gaite, Julio Cortazar, Ignacio Martinez de Pison, Enrique Vila-Matas and Tomas Eloy Martinez. She lives in Toronto.