Juan Gabriel Vásquez retraces his most intense obsessions: the weight of the past, memory faults, how our lives intersect with the political world. But it is also a novel about the importance of opinion in our societies. In the demanding genre of the novel, which has given so many masterpieces in the Latin American tradition, Vásquez gives us his most intimate: an intense reflection on the weakness of public and private judgments on irreversible encounters.