‘Five Tuesdays in Winter’ by Lily King (2021) – 231 pages
‘Songs for the Flames’ by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (2018) – 237 pages Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
When I have two collections of short stories I want to read, both by authors whom I admire and whom I have read before, I like to bounce back and forth between the two. I alternate reading the individual stories by the two writers, because somehow that makes both sets of stories more interesting. That way I can compare and contrast. So now my victims are ‘Five Tuesdays in Winter’ by Lily King and ‘Songs for the Flames’ by Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The content and the style of these two collections have almost nothing in common, which makes the effort even more fun for me.
Most of Lily King’s vivacious stories in ‘Five Tuesdays in Winter’ take place in the home, mostly upper and upper-middle class homes. She even makes the distinction between mansions and houses; mansions are stone and houses are wood, a distinction I had not considered but surely rings true. King’s stories are domestic stories of social interactions between members of a family and their friends. Several of the stories are coming of age stories of young people growing up within the family. Lily King has a light touch which I much appreciated. I loved the title story which was all about “the most reticent man in the world”. I found King’s stories to be lively and buoyant.
The stories of Juan Gabriel Vásquez have a much larger canvas. Vásquez is vitally aware of nearly every facet of public life in the nation of Colombia over the past fifty years and has studied the past of Colombia from its earliest days. His stories resonate with the history of Colombia. Colombia has been one of the most war-torn countries during the last fifty years with over 220,000 of its citizens killed, the large majority of them civilians. His stories are cosmopolitan; they often take place in airports or hotels in Bogota or Paris or other places. Nearly all the people who populate Vásquez’s stories are grown-ups dealing with grown up problems.
The stories in ‘Songs for the Flames’ are more substantial and thus require more effort for the reader to understand and appreciate them. The stories involve drug traffickers, paramilitary death squads, hit men, informants, intelligence agents, machine gun fire, the police, the army, persecution by the drug cartels, organized and unorganized crime, and detectives.
On a lighter note, I will leave you today with a line of French which appears untranslated in one of the family stories of Lily King:
“une femme qui rit est une femme au lit”.
Let’s just say this line will be worth your while to translate.
Stay tuned for the next and final round of this contest when I will announce the winner.
Tony's Book World 
Posted by Janakay | YouMightAsWellRead on December 15, 2021 at 4:34 AM
I love the idea of alernating stories between two different collections! I will definitely try this the next time I’m on a short story kick, as I think it would eliminate that feeling of “too much” that I frequently get when I read a collection consisting entirely of the works of one writer.
I was very interested in both these collections. I discovered Lily King early last year, when I read Writers & Lovers. I didn’t expect to like it, for some reason, and was very surprised when I did! So much so in fact that I decided to catch up on King’s backlist, as I’d missed Euphoria, which is the novel most people seem to have read. When Five Tuesdays was recently published, I snapped it up. I think you capture King’s appeal perfectly; as you note, she has a light touch and a focus on social interactions, both of which appeal to me very much. That line of French (which of course I immediately goggled) is a classic Lily King touch, I think!
I haven’t read anything by Vásquez although he’s been on my radar for quite some time. I think I’ve avoided his work because I have the (perhaps erroneous) idea that it may be too grim for me. On the other hand, I am fairly interested in Columbia. I actually visited the country around 2009, shortly after the civil war was winding down and it was safe (at least in most places) for tourists (I was on a birding tour. Columbia has lots of interesting birds & critters). The people I talked to, admittedly a small group (these were Columbians who could speak English) were almost shell-shocked and desperate to believe the violence could be coming to an end. It really put a human face on a situation that hadn’t previously been unreal to me. You know, I really must read something by Vásquez!
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Posted by Anokatony on December 15, 2021 at 6:30 AM
Hi Janakay,
Somehow I am fascinated with these stories of the countries in which the United States interfered in the governments like Colombia, Chile, and Argentina. I will be doing a novel about the Chile situation very soon. ‘The Sound of Things Falling’ by Vasquez is an excellent novel about the Colombia situation.
I discovered Lily King with ‘Euphoria’, read ‘Writers and Lovers’, and now she’s on my “must read” list. I tried that French line of Lily King recently, when I said to this woman sitting next to me “I’m good-natured and quite quiet”. She smiled and said “I’m not”. We laughed and that established a rapport. It didn’t lead anywhere but was fun. I’m a married man.
I guess things have improved in Colombia over the past ten years.
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