Juan Gabriel Vásquez: Reputations

And then he’ll do the same with all the rest.

Reputations is a work of fiction; any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental. Having fulfilled this convention, which no reader should take completely seriously, I wish to thank those who gave me their time and offered me anecdotes from their lives or ideas about their trade, especially Vladimir Flórez, Vladdo , and Andrés Rábago, El Roto . Other political cartoonists lent me, unknowingly, more or less concrete information, and I’d also like to recognize my debt — more ambiguous and less direct — to Antonio Caballero, Héctor Osuna and José María Pérez González, Peridis . In order to write about the death of Ricardo Rendón, I found the book 5 en humor , by María Teresa Ronderos, very useful. I would also like to acknowledge my unpayable debt to Jorge Ruffinelli and Héctor Hoyos, of Stanford University, for the invitation and the hospitality that allowed me to finish this novel in an apartment on Oak Creek Drive, in Palo Alto, California. Finally, I’d like once more to give myself the pleasure (and put on record the infinite good fortune) of finishing a book by writing the name Mariana.

I would like to thank Bill Swainson for his unerring eye and ear, his encouragement, patience and inspiration during the translation of this and quite a few other books over the last decade and a half.

AM

Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in Bogotá 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 Dublin Literary Award, the Alfaguara Prize, the Gregor von Rezzori Prize, the Prix Roger Caillois and he has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Reputations was awarded the Royal Spanish Academy Prize in 2014. His books have been published in twenty-six languages and forty countries. After sixteen years in France, Belgium and Spain, he now lives in Bogotà.

Anne McLean has translated works by many Spanish and Latin American authors including Héctor Abad, Javier Cercas, Carmen Martín Gaite, Julio Cortázar, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Enrique Vila-Matas and Tomás Eloy Martínez. Novels she has translated have been awarded the Premio Valle Inclán, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She lives in Toronto.