The opening story of this collection, titled “Hiding Places” situates that particular narrative as a kind of foreshadowing of not just the rest of the stories, but also the backstory to their composition and the subsequent publication of the Lovers on All Saints’ Day. The first person narrator of this tale is a writer working on a project about a bookshop in Paris which has been commissioned by a Colombian magazine. The narrator commences the story, however, by confessing to hardly ever even making it out of Belgium: “I spent the time observing the people of the Ardennes and participating in their activities, and then learning to write what I’d seen in such a way that as little of it as possible would be squandered.”
Like his narrator in that story, Juan Gabriel Vásquez is Columbian writer who has written his fair share of journalistic pieces. Lovers on All Saints’ Day, however, is a book of fiction in the form of a collection of stories connected predominantly by two central factors. The stories take place in Europe rather than the Colombian setting of his novels (perfectly understandable considering a sixteen year self-exile on the continent before returning to his homeland in 2012) and they mostly pursue a theme of desperate desires to find some kind of love connection that is ultimately thwarted by unfortunate revelations of truths. While verging close to territory that might be warrant the description of being tales that hang on the introduction of a plot twist, the manner of writing is such that one does not really feel the intrusion of such a false note.
For example, a story most typical of the approach is “At the Café de la République” which follows a post-separation reunion of two lovers over the course of which the man begins to build up a fantasy of a more permanent reunion. These hopes are dashed at the end by the revelation of the full extent of the woman’s unshakeable commitment to the parting remaining permanent as she brings up something from the past as a way of declaring her belief that it can never be otherwise. This information could have been supplied earlier in the text or, for that matter, cut from the story entirely without any fundamental alteration of the events or emotions. The revelation of the woman’s true feelings and the motivation behind them are important for to known. For the reader…not so much
And that is the template which most of the stories follow. It also brings us back around to that opening line of “Hiding Places.” The stories fulfill that the idea that the author as well as his creation spent a good deal of time observing closely the fine details of the people of Ardennes (and elsewhere) in order to learn how to write. These stories are demonstration of early efforts to craft stories by a writer who would later go onto explore the larger canvas of the novel. They are stories revealing a writer grasping with the various ways of introducing information into a story so that “as little of it as possible would be squandered.”
