Book review: Complex truths about inconvenient relationships in Juan Grabriel Vásquez’s Lovers on All Saints’ Day

To date, Juan Gabriel Vásquez's fiction has played out in and around his native Colombia. The Informers (2009) was about a German Jewish family finding refuge in Colombia before the Second World War. The Secret History of Costaguana (2011) reimagined the origins of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo while charting Colombia's painful past. Then, in his superb breakthrough novel, The Sound of Things Falling (2013), Vásquez tackled Colombia's more recent trauma, specifically the aftershock of the war of attrition between drug cartels and government.

It comes as a surprise, therefore, to discover that the stories within Vásquez's first collection, Lovers on All Saints' Day, are set partly in France but mostly in Belgium. In the book's author's note, Vásquez explains that they were all written between 1998 and 2002 (which accounts for characters paying in francs, listening to cassettes and using payphones), while he was living in Europe. Thanks to Anne McLean's excellent translation, these stories are now available in English, and strengthen Vásquez's reputation as one of the vital voices in contemporary fiction.

Each story revolves around an aspect of love – romance, desire, fidelity, betrayal – and tracks the lengths to which individuals will go to feel wanted, fulfilled and vindicated.

In the opener, Hiding Places, a writer en route to Paris stops in Belgium and stays with old friends – only to feel useless and intrusive when apprised of the death of a child and news of an extramarital affair.

In the almost eponymous The All Saints' Day Lovers, we progress to a relationship that is foundering, a gutsy wife and a different kind of errant husband – one who disappears in the night to console a grieving widow.

In many ways, the remaining five stories take the themes and emotions of the first two and put them through fresh permutations. Lovers win, lose and cheat. Love is tested, strained; love dies, conquers all. In the wee hours we get heartache, disclosed secrets and confronted demons. More than once, we encounter women who know men better than men know themselves, and enough tears, guilt, accusations and recriminations from both sexes. In each case, Vásquez gives it to us straight, his realism a far cry from the magical variation of his compatriot Gabriel García Márquez.

One of the best stories here is also the longest. Life on Grímsey Island sees a man and woman meet at an exhibition of circus horses, before eloping to a hotel for the night. Slowly, Vásquez ekes out pertinent facts: Oliveira is from rich stock but has renounced his considerable inheritance; Agatha is a vet who longs to visit Iceland and is mourning a daughter who died in a cult. Over the course of the night, as they grow more familiar and move from the impersonal hotel to the intimacy of Agatha's home, passion gives way to mystery, confession, and finally tragedy.

Another standout tale, At the Café de la République, set in "falsely grand and rather provincial" Paris, follows a couple who separated six months ago but reunite as a one-off for appearances' sake. Towards the end, after receiving good news about his cancer scare and surviving a difficult meeting with his father, Léopold decides he wants Selma back. But not for the first time in this collection does a female character deliver hard truths and thwart a man's rose-tinted plans.

Vásquez pulls the reader in several unexpected directions: the short, hard-edged tale The Return, features a woman released from prison for poisoning her fiancé; The Solitude of the Magician feels like one of the more erotic chapters from John Updike's Couples; and The Lodger ends with a haunting image of a dead man casting a cold shadow over a relationship.

Throughout these stories, Vásquez brings his flawed and complex characters vividly to life, exposing them first from the outside and then mapping their inner thoughts, feelings and impulses. One woman’s body is like “a badly fired ceramic … threatening to crack or fall to the floor”; another has “bright white stretch marks like the slimy trails of a cemetery snail”. One couple’s love is, quite simply, “a shared fear of being alone”.

To begin with, it feels strange to be transported by Vásquez not to the mean streets of Bogotá or a mosquito-infested rainforest but to a boulangerie in northern France or a boar hunt in the Ardennes. But we quickly overcome our culture shock and realise that where we really are is in capable hands, and reading one intricately plotted and exquisitely told story after another.

Malcolm Forbes is a freelance ­essayist and reviewer.