Colombia is a country that lives in two worlds. Host to vast deserts, labyrinth rainforests, Caribbean beaches and awe-inspiring mountains, it’s one of the most biodiverse nations in the world. It’s hard to travel more than a few hours without the landscape completely changing, and its people are as open and as flourishing as the land around them. However, its history is dogged by a bloody violence, decades of unrest that still claws at the country’s back as it tries to move forward. When Escobar was killed in ’93, it didn’t instantly heal the wounds he had made. Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s fascinating novel The Sound of Things Falling pries open those wounds, and provides a case study of national trauma as chilling as it is beautiful.
The story follows university professor Antonia Yammara and his relationship with Ricardo Laverde, a former convict who he meets at a Bogotá billiards hall. After receiving a mysterious, unmarked cassette tape, Laverde is gunned down on a street corner and dies in Yammara’s arms. Unable to let go of the trauma he has witnessed, Yammara searches tirelessly into the life of his dead friend, seeking to discover why he went to prison, who had him killed, and what was on that fatal tape. His investigation leads him deep into Colombia’s troubled, drug-fuelled past, towards other people just as broken and afraid as himself, all the while pushing him further away from the loved ones around him. The parallels between his story and his country’s story are for all to see, and serves as a haunting exhibit of the paralysing power that trauma can have on a person.
What makes this novel excel beyond the reigns of a typical psychological thriller is in its sensitivity and its attention to detail. Vásquez silk-like writing has an immense talent for picking out historic details that other authors would have missed. The book even opens with an account of a hippopotamus that escaped from Escobar’s personal exotic zoo after the mob kingpin was killed. And Vásquez uses these overlooked details as the coat-hangers for his narrative. The result is a very impressive, tightly knitted, utterly unpredictable brand of storytelling, which manages to pull away from the big picture of Colombian violence, and bring real tangible life to those souls caught in the crossfire.
While Vásquez is clearly a very talented writer, it must be said that there are occasions where his particular virtuoso style goes a bit too far. Every so often, he lingers on unnecessarily poetic tangents and strays into musings that were better left unsaid. Mostly, these are brief throwaway phrases that can be overlooked, but the hundred-page flashback to Laverde’s youth is certainly a mismanaged offence. It’s not that this section of the book is bad, only that it is far more pedestrian and far less emotionally charged than the main plot, whose riveting momentum it stops right in its tracks.
However, each act of this novel, of which there are six, bleeds with a history and a culture mostly unknown to the average European reader. And the plot and pace of the text is secondary to this. What matters more to Vásquez is that his country is bruised, but not beaten, his people hurt, but still standing. In a discourse so often hijacked by the whirlwind of Escobar’s cocaine trade, The Sounds of Things Falling gives a powerful, nurturing voice to the everyday citizens who were left to clean up his mess.
What makes this novel excel beyond the reigns of a typical psychological thriller is in its sensitivity and its attention to detail. Vásquez silk-like writing has an immense talent for picking out historic details that other authors would have missed. The book even opens with an account of a hippopotamus that escaped from Escobar’s personal exotic zoo after the mob kingpin was killed. And Vásquez uses these overlooked details as the coat-hangers for his narrative. The result is a very impressive, tightly knitted, utterly unpredictable brand of storytelling, which manages to pull away from the big picture of Colombian violence, and bring real tangible life to those souls caught in the crossfire.
While Vásquez is clearly a very talented writer, it must be said that there are occasions where his particular virtuoso style goes a bit too far. Every so often, he lingers on unnecessarily poetic tangents and strays into musings that were better left unsaid. Mostly, these are brief throwaway phrases that can be overlooked, but the hundred-page flashback to Laverde’s youth is certainly a mismanaged offence. It’s not that this section of the book is bad, only that it is far more pedestrian and far less emotionally charged than the main plot, whose riveting momentum it stops right in its tracks.
However, each act of this novel, of which there are six, bleeds with a history and a culture mostly unknown to the average European reader. And the plot and pace of the text is secondary to this. What matters more to Vásquez is that his country is bruised, but not beaten, his people hurt, but still standing. In a discourse so often hijacked by the whirlwind of Escobar’s cocaine trade, The Sounds of Things Falling gives a powerful, nurturing voice to the everyday citizens who were left to clean up his mess.
review written by Alex George
RSS Feed
