"Or are you going to tell me that known history is the only version of things? No, please, don't be so naive. What you call history is no more than the winning story, Vasquez. Someone made that story and not others win, and that’s why we believe it today. Or rather: we believe it because it got written down, because it wasn't lost in the endless hole of words that only get said, or even worse, that aren’t even spoken, but are only thought."

This book revolves around two assassinations. In October 1914, General Rafael Uribe Uribe was hacked to death by two men wielding machetes. He was the "indisputable leader of the Liberal party, senator of the Republic of Colombia and veteran of four civil wars". Almost 34 years later, on 9 April 1948, Liberal presidential candidate (a potential Colombian JFK) Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was shot and killed by Juan Roa Sierra, who was immediately beaten to death by a mob (most notably, for this book, before anyone could learn anything about his motives or any associates he may have had).

In the first part of the book, we are gradually pulled into a world of conspiracy theories, of men whose motives we are unsure of. Benavides seems OK, but we begin to wonder - is he pulling more strings than we can see? Caraballo is obsessive, a fanatic: he sees links between the assassinations and the death of John F. Kennedy. Is he paranoid, is he mad? Is he right?

Vasquez sets himself as the narrator of the book (we learn about his previous novels, the birth of his daughters) and skilfully sets about merging fact and fiction to build a story that draws the reader in. We are presented with quotes from various Spanish-language writers (most frequently Gabriel Garcia Marquez), we are shown photographs of key moments or pieces of evidence. But we know that not everything we are being told is "fact". And this is partly the point of the book, I think. Vasquez tells us that history isn’t just "facts" - everything we call history is an interpretation of what remains after the event (the shape of the ruins).

As Vasquez gets sucked into Caraballo's orbit, I, too, found myself being sucked into the story and keen to know how this auto-fiction detective thriller was going to play out.

For me, things took a bit of a down turn just over a third of the way through. At this point, the narrative switches to a prolonged (I want to say interminable) description of Uribe’s assassination. It is an important part of the book, but it lasts for at least 200 pages (feels like more) and the book is only just recovering from it when it reaches the final page. I would be the first to acknowledge that my reaction might be completely different were I Colombian and more invested in the history being told.

Be that as it may, this is, overall, a fascinating novel that intertwines two key events and investigates the political machinations of a country that I know very little about.

"It’s another turn of the screw in the relationship between history and the novel. The novel is becoming the great instrument of historical speculation."

Having recently re-read DeLillo's Libra and Munoz Molina's Like a Fading Shadow, I find myself agreeing! Much of this is an engrossing story and it’s only my struggle with the length of the middle section that makes me mark it down.

This is a marvellous book but, strangely for me, it's hard to put my finger precisely on what makes it so powerful and, ultimately, moving. Straddling that contested area between fact and fiction, where the narrator shares the name of the author, this certainly has the postmodern feel of Eco's [book:Foucault's Pendulum|295873] crossed with the historical self-consciousness of Binet's [book:HHhH|17118721]. I'm confident that readers better versed in Latin American literature than I am will spot other influences and literary relationships.

On one level this narrates key episodes in the C20th history of Columbia via, especially, two assassinations of Leftist leaders. Alongside this, however, are richer veins that meditate on history and story-telling, on the interpenetration of past and present, on inheritances in personal, national and even wider terms.

Vásquez writes unflashy, precise and intelligent prose (a shout-out, too, to the translator) and the stories that unfurl are quietly gripping. Inevitably, this isn't linear but Vásquez keeps his histories circulating through levels of narratives, stories embedded within stories, not doing that cheap trick of flitting around between time periods that every other novel seems to perform.

The way this is put together is masterful as we finally, along with the narrator, see the shape of the book we've been reading. But it's also exceptional at the local level: 'they are simply human remains, ruins, yes, the ruins of noble men.'

Deeply political, deeply humane, deeply literary - a nexus of ideas meld together to form a narrative of distinction and significance. In some ways the conclusion could be profoundly pessimistic: 'because nothing has changed here in centuries of existence and never will change' - and yet the very power of words serves to undermine that desolation: 'he wanted me to make a mausoleum of words where his father could dwell, and he also wanted the last two hours his father lived to be documented just as he understood them, because that way his father would not just have a place in the world, but would have played a part in history'.