A new perspective on the River Thames
January 2012
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Resident in the Room from 22 - 25 January 2012.
I have come to the river, to this steamboat run ashore on the rooftops of London, 121 years and 172 days after Captain Joseph Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, on board SS Roi des Belges, wrote these instructions:
"Low land and outlying sandbanks a little to port. Steering for a little square white patch. Stick on it. Pass close to the sands - Cautiously!"
Photograph by Nina Soubin
“For any novelist, the prospect of working on the Roi des Belges would be intriguing; for a devotee of Conrad, it is nothing short of magical. The ghosts of Kurtz and Marlow will mingle with the million ghosts of London, which is not a city, but a metaphor. In my days on board, I hope to discover what it stands for.” - Juan Gabriel Vásquez, prior to his time aboard A Room for London
Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in Bogotá in 1973. He studied Latin American literature at the Sorbonne between 1996 and 1998, and now lives in Barcelona. His stories have appeared in anthologies in Germany, France, Spain, and Colombia, and he has translated works by E.M. Forster and Victor Hugo, amongst others, into Spanish. His essays, reviews and reportage have appeared in various magazines and literary supplements. He was recently nominated as one of the Bogota 39, South America’s most promising writers of the new generation.
Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean and published by Bloomsbury in May 2008 and in paperback in April 2009, The Informers was Vásquez's first novel to be translated into English and was shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
The Secret History of Costaguana, also published by Bloomsbury, is a superb, joyful, thoughtful and rumbustious novel that will establish Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s reputation as one of the leading novelists of his generation.
