Get past that, and the story itself is compelling: Gabriel Santoro, in an attempt to impress his professor father, writes and publishes a biography of his father's friend, Sara Guterman, daughter of the Jewish hotel owner who has fled from Nazi Germany. Instead of being proud of his son, Gabriel's father becomes enraged, denounces him as talentless and writes a heartless review for the newspaper. Obviously his son has touched on a secret of his father, and as the book opens, after three years of silence, his father is due to have an operation and asks Gabriel to visit him.
Six months later, on a tryst in Medellin with his 20-years-younger lover, Gabriel's father is killed in a freak car accident on a dangerous cliff road. And that's when things start to get interesting. Angelina, the lover, shows up at the funeral. She knows something she's not telling and soon arranges to tell it all to a television interviewer. Before that can happen, Sara Guterman decides that Gabriel deserves to know the truth, and she will tell him herself on a long, long New Year's Eve. One by one, the things he believed about his father turn out to be not true.
Many of the characters are expatriate Germans who fled their homeland in the 1930s only to find themselves blacklisted in 1943, suspected of having dangerous allegiances to Nazism. The book's title refers not only to the backstabbing informers who put their friends and neighbors on the blacklist, but also to the other informers, like Sara and Angelina, who slowly and patiently tell Gabriel who his father really was. Not only is The Informers about all the events leading up to the writing of the book, but the last 80 pages are a postscript to the publication of the novel-within-the-novel and an actual encounter with the book's most enigmatic character, Gabriel's father's best friend, the son of the man he blacklisted, who has now read Gabriel's The Informers and would like to have a word with him.
It's tough, complicated, fascinating stuff, right up to its satisfying, morally-complex ending.--Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: A morally and stylistically complex novel about Nazi Germany, expatriate Germans and Jews in Colombia, betrayals and family secrets.