Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Bogotá, 1973) studied Latin American literature in Paris before spending nearly a decade living in Barcelona. He has since emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in the Latin American literary canon. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has received numerous literary awards, including the prestigious Premio Alfaguara, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Mario Vargas Llosa Novel Biennial, and the Cálamo Extraordinario in 2025.
Feliza’s Names (Los nombros de Feliza)
“I realized that understanding Feliza was a challenging endeavor. There was nothing simple when it came to her.”
On January 8th, 1982, Colombian sculptor Feliza Bursztyn died in a Paris restaurant. She was forty-eight years old. At the time of her sudden death, she was with her husband and four of her friends. One of them, writer Gabriel García Márquez, published an article days later, which included four seemingly simple yet deeply mysterious words: “She died of sadness.”
Juan Gabriel Vásquez takes those words to begin his research on the secret or unknown life of an extraordinary woman. Feliza Bursztyn always confronted the society she lived in. Daughter of an expatriated Jewish couple in Colombia, she was a revolutionary artist in a time of political revolutions, a free-spirited woman in a world suspicious of the freedom of women, who led an existence that staged the great tensions of the twentieth century, and above all, the desire to be her own person.
In Feliza’s Names, the author skillfully blends autobiography, reality, and imagination to deliver an amazing and heart-wrenching fiction about how a human being’s private life gets inevitably trampled on by the forces of history and politics.
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