Los nombres de Feliza by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Madrid. Alfaguara. 2025. 288 pages.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s latest novel, Los nombres de Feliza, tells the story in fictionalized form of real-life Colombian sculptress Feliza Bursztyn (1933–1982), whose life was marked by art, love, political engagement, and, perhaps more than anything else, personal independence. Vásquez became aware of Bursztyn thanks to an article published by Gabriel García Márquez upon her sudden death at a restaurant in Paris in 1982.

In a carefully crafted narrative, Vásquez blends the voice of a first-person narrator with that of an inquisitive reporter to trace the intense, rebellious life of his protagonist. Born in Bogotá to Jewish immigrants, Bursztyn was educated in New York as a youngster. There she met her first husband, Larry Fleischer, with whom she had three daughters but would later divorce.

After studying in Paris under the tutelage of Ossip Zadkine, she discovered her true artistic calling working with chatarras (sculptures made out of recycled metal junk), a strange new artistic material at the time. Back in Colombia, Bursztyn would go on to produce groundbreaking, provocative works of art with her chatarras but was often criticized because her work was misunderstood. However, Feliza’s sculptures not only defied the Colombian artistic status quo but, perhaps more importantly, questioned traditional roles for women in a male-dominated society.

Vásquez’s narrative underscores the protagonist’s provocatively complex personality while carefully reviewing a life in which a creative spirit and unconventional love often go hand in hand. In the process of examining Feliza’s life story, Vásquez reviews Colombia’s turbulent political history during the second half of the twentieth century. In fact, as we learn about Feliza’s many trials and tribulations, we also become aware of her friendships with key figures of Colombia’s artistic and literary establishment (writers Jorge Gaitán Durán and Gabriel García Márquez, art critic Marta Traba, and playwright Santiago García, among others), all of whom shared her defiant, critical spirit that was often seen as a threat by the political establishment. In the end, it was Bursztyn’s political activism that would force her into exile in Paris, where she died unexpectedly in early 1982 at age forty-eight.

Fact and fiction, an inquisitive imagination, and excellent storytelling all come together in this excellent fictional biography, a narrative in which beauty, pain, and tragedy share center stage. Los nombres de Feliza is not only a fine addition to Vásquez’s already impressive body of work; it is also a reminder of why the Colombian author is among the most striking talents to have emerged in Latin America in recent years.

César Ferreira
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee