Reputations

"The political cartoons of Javier Mallarino were so influential in his native Colombia that political fortunes rose and fell by the strokes of his pen. With that power came public adulation, but also death threats and ultimately the burden of responsibility for the impact of his drawings on the reputations of others. The crisis of conscience that plagues him feels very real, but Mallarino is not — he’s a fictional character, the central figure in Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s novel, Reputations. At the core of his story is a question that is never answered and that’s part of his M.O. as a novelist. Vásquez cites Anton Chekhov for the wisdom that literature’s job is not to find answers, but to find the most interesting questions possible."