Lovers on All Saints' Day

Vásquez's late-1990s sojourn in Belgium and France, far from his native Colombia, provides the setting for these seven stories, which originally appeared in 2001, before his later successes with The Secret History of Castaguana and the Alfaguara Prize-winning The Sound of Things Falling. The most important theme here is that of broken relationships, marital as well as familial, with the narratives revolving around episodes of separations and infidelity; in one story, for instance, even as a wife awaits the return of her husband with wood for their stove, he beds another woman, pained by the problems in his marriage. Such episodes are perhaps best summed up by the cynical remark, "Lovers are not made for pondering the consequences of their own actions." In keeping with the title, the stories take place in late fall and involve deaths, emotional as well as physical.