'The Informers' by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

The past is a shadow-bound, elusive creature in Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vasquez's "The Informers." When pursued it may flee, or, if cornered, it may unleash terrible truths. Disturb it even slightly and it can subsume the present, as a journalist learns when his memoir of a family friend inadvertently illuminates events his father -- and his country -- would prefer remained forgotten.

"The Informers" is narrated by Gabriel Santoro, a Bogota reporter and author of a book that recounts the life story of a Jewish German immigrant named Sara Guterman whose family was one of many to escape to Colombia during the early years of Nazism. The primary distinction of "A Life in Exile," this book within a book, is the review it receives from Santoro's identically named father. The elder Santoro, a professor with a reputation as the moral conscience of the embattled nation, inexplicably savages the book in a prominent newspaper.

When his son confronts him, the scholar elaborates on his dismissal: "Memory isn't public. . . . [T]hose who through prayer or pretense had arrived at a certain conciliation, are now back to square one. . . . you come along, white knight of history, to display your courage by awakening things . . . you and your parasitical book, your exploitative book, your intrusive book."

What the book has stirred up -- or what the elder Santoro imagines it has -- is talk of the blacklists of the 1940s. German and Austrian immigrants suspected of Nazi sympathies were consigned to these lists, often as a result of the testimony of informants. In most cases, financial ruin soon followed. The vast majority of those blacklisted were innocent.

One such man was Konrad Deresser, the father of the elder Santoro and Guterman's childhood friend Enrique. His blacklisting led to confinement in a hotel-turned-internment-camp, the failure of his marriage, and finally his suicide.

After the encounter, the two Gabriel Santoros do not speak for three years. Their reconciliation is precipitated by the father's brush with death; a checkup reveals he is in need of a coronary bypass. He pulls through and recovers, thanks in large part to the ministrations of a physical therapist, Angelina, who soon becomes his lover. The two journey together to her hometown of Medellin, and there the elder Santoro dies when his car careens off a treacherous mountain road.