Review by New York Times Review
The author of this book is from Colombia, but he is nothing like Gabriel García Márquez. Juan Gabriel Vásquez's brilliant new novel rejects the vivid colors and mythical transformations of his older countryman's Caribbean masterpiece, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," in favor of the cold, bitter poetry of Bogotá and the hushed intensity of young married love. In "The Sound of Things Falling," we are closer to the noir palette of the Uruguayan genius Juan Carlos Onetti, whose fiction was apt to be set in a bankrupt shipyard or to feature a desperate writer striving to raise money for his wife's cancer surgery. Of García Márquez, Vásquez once declared: "I want to forget this absurd rhetoric of Latin America as a magical or marvelous continent. In my novel there is a disproportionate reality, but that which is disproportionate in it is the violence and cruelty of our history and of our politics. Let me be clear about this. ... I can say that reading 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' ... in my adolescence may have contributed much to my literary calling, but I believe that magic realism is the least interesting part of this novel. I suggest reading 'One Hundred Years' as a distorted version of Colombian history." A gripping novel, absorbing right to the end, "The Sound of Things Falling" concerns a young professor of jurisprudence named Antonio who plays billiards every afternoon in Bogotá to unwind after delivering his lecture. In the billiard hall, he befriends a frail older man, Laverde, who, it is rumored, has only recently been released from prison. Standing out in the street, they're shot at by two men on a passing motorbike. Laverde is killed and Antonio severely wounded. Antonio becomes so fearful he can't sleep. As his marriage to his loving wife, Aura, deteriorates, he is contacted by Laverde's daughter, Maya, who scarcely knew her father. When Antonio visits Maya's home in the countryside, he learns that in Laverde's youth he was a pilot, a hippie who flew shipments of marijuana and cocaine into the United States, where he was arrested and given a 19-year sentence. Maya's mother, an American Peace Corps worker, returned alone to the United States in the late 1980s, after her daughter turned 18 and the streets of Bogotá became lethal. She was flying back to reunite with Laverde and Maya when her plane crashed. In Colombia, where everything can be bought, the bereaved daughter has procured the black-box recording of the pilots' chatter as they headed into a mountainside, a recording she listens to again and again. Everything seems to be falling: the plane, Antonio's marriage, Colombia itself. "The Sound of Things Falling" may be a page turner, but it's also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in translation, the superb quality of Vásquez's prose is evident, captured in Anne McLean's idiomatic English version. All the novel's characters are well imagined, original and rounded. Bogotá and the Colombian countryside are beautifully if grimly described. On his way to visit Laverde's daughter, Antonio finds himself "heading for the city's western exit routes. It was an overcast and cold morning, and the traffic at that hour was already dense and even aggressive; but it didn't take me too long to get to the outskirts of the city.... I don't know how many times I made similar trips as a child, how many times I went up the mountains that surround the city to then make that precipitous descent, and thus pass in a matter of three hours from our cold and rainy climate down 2,600 meters into the Magdalena Valley, where the temperatures can approach 40 degrees Celsius in some ill-fated spots." One particularly striking scene takes place in an abandoned zoo, originally financed by the drug lord Pablo Escobar decades earlier and now going to ruin. At the end of the 1970s, Escobar had bought almost eight square miles in order to build his personal paradise, but after his death in 1993 the animal cages and the fake reconstructions of dinosaurs were left to rust. The kangaroo that kicked a football and the parrot that recited the names of the members of the Colombian national soccer team have long since disappeared, and the garage is full of antique cars (including Al Capone's Pontiac) that are falling apart. Most of the rare animals have died from neglect, though when Antonio and Maya visit the place they encounter a hippo on the loose. After this bizarre outing, Antonio and Maya sleep together. "I thought how the two of us were alone in this room and in this house," Antonio reflects, "but alone with a shared solitude, each of us alone with our own pain deep in our flesh but mitigating it at the same time by the strange arts of nakedness." Maya is living in the house her father built for her mother with the first profits of his drug runs. Antonio is drawn to her partly because they both grew up in the tragic '80s in Bogotá, while Antonio's wife had a protected childhood elsewhere. Laverde presumably was killed because he had once again been dabbling in drug-dealing. Vásquez has constructed his plot very carefully, its past and present elements neatly meshing. We learn, for example, that Laverde's father's face was disfigured after a horrifying plane crash during a patriotic demonstration in the late 1930s, an event that mirrors the death of Laverde's American wife in another crash half a century later. Every life, Vásquez suggests, is determined by remote causes: "No one who lives long enough can be surprised to find their biography has been molded by distant events, by other people's wills, with little or no participation from our own decisions. Those long processes that end up running into our life - sometimes to give it the shove it needed, sometimes to blow to smithereens our most splendid plans - tend to be hidden like subterranean currents, like tiny shifts of tectonic plates, and when the earthquake finally comes we invoke the words we've learned to calm ourselves, accident, fluke and sometimes fate." The novel is built on Colombia's tragic history as a country enriched and destroyed by drugs. Vásquez (who has lived in France, Spain, Belgium and the United States) has addressed his homeland's troubled history in previous works. In "The Informers," for example, a young man publishes a book about a Jewish woman who took refuge from Hitler in Colombia - and the author's own father writes a devastatingly negative review in a local newspaper. Much of the action takes place in a Colombian hotel, full of Germans, both Nazis and Jews. Vásquez dealt with the sins of fathers, Colombia's nefarious past and the cyclical nature of misfortune in that earlier novel as well as in this one. Is it any accident that he has also written a novel, "The Secret History of Costaguana," that reimagines the life of Joseph Conrad, who in turn reimagined Colombia in "Nostromo"? "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary," Conrad wrote in "Under Western Eyes," adding that "men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." It's a conclusion with which Juan Gabriel Vásquez would seem to agree. Juan Gabriel Vásquez's novel may be a page turner, but it's also a deep meditation on fate and death. Edmund White's memoir about his years in Paris, "Inside a Pearl," will be published next winter.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 25, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Ricardo Laverde does the one thing he must do A person doesn't have to do anything but die cut down in the streets of Bogota by the same drug lords he once served as a pilot. But in dying, Ricardo leaves behind a billiards-room acquaintance, Antonio Yammara, who lives with an ugly scar from a bullet fired by Ricardo's assassins and with the daunting task of deciphering the hidden meaning of Ricardo's life. Through the literary magic of one of Latin America's most talented novelists, readers share that task with Antonio, probing the violence and fear spawned by the cruelly protracted drug war in which Ricardo perishes. Insistently pressing Antonio for the story behind Ricardo's death is Maya Fitts, daughter of Ricardo and Elena Fitts, an American Peace Corps volunteer who long hides from her daughter the very existence of her criminal father and who herself dies aboard a plane taking her back to Colombia. As readers join Antonio and Maya in listening intently to the black-box recording from that plane, they will marvel at how Vasquez fuses past and present, hope and despair, in one unforgettable moment. A deft translation delivers the searing trauma and the tender intimations of a masterpiece.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"That story is to blame," declares a character in Colombian author Vasquez's latest novel (after The Secret History of Costaguana). Indeed, this book is an exploration of the ways in which stories profoundly impact lives. Around 1996, when murder and bloody mayhem fueled by the drug trade were commonplace in Bogota, the young law professor Antonio Yammara befriends enigmatic stranger Ricardo Laverde. One night, assassins on motorbikes open fire on the two, killing Laverde and seriously wounding Yammara. Conflicted and at a loss to understand the damage Laverde has wrought, Yammara looks into his life story. Yammara suffers from crippling psychic and physical wounds as a result of the shooting, and his investigation takes him to Laverde's shabby Bogota apartment, where he receives a gruesome clue from the grieving landlady. Yammara eventually finds Laverde's daughter Maya, a beekeeper who lives in the Colombian countryside. She shows Yammara photos and letters she's collected about the father she never knew. Together they lose themselves in stories of Laverde's childhood; of Maya's American mother, Elaine Fritts; and of Elaine and Laverde's love affair. Vasquez allows the story to become Elaine's, and as the puzzle of Laverde is pieced together, Yammara comes to realize just how thoroughly the stories of these other people are part of his own. Agent: Casanovas & Lynch Agencia Literaria (Spain). (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Drug cartels in the 1990s form the backdrop of this 2011 Alfaguara Prize winner about a law professor who probes the truth behind the drive-by murder of a retired drug-trafficking pilot, the plane crash that killed the pilot's estranged wife, and the familial recollections of their apiarist daughter. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An odd coincidence leads Antonio Yammara, a law professor and narrator of this novel from Latin American author Vsquez (The Informers, 2009, etc.), deep into the mystery of personality, both his own and especially that of Ricardo Laverde, a casual acquaintance of Yammara before he was gunned down on the streets of Bogot. The catalyst for memory here is perhaps unique in the history of the novel, for Yammara begins by recounting an anecdote involving a hippopotamus that had escaped from a zoo established in Colombia's Magdalena Valley by the drug baron Pablo Escobar. After the hippo is shot, Yammara is taken back 13 years to his acquaintance with Laverde, a pilot involved in drug running. Yammara is a youngish professor of law in Bogot, and, generally bored, he spends his nights bedding his students and playing billiards. Engaged in the latter activity, Yammara meets Laverde without knowing his backgroundfor example, that Laverde had just been released from a 19-year prison stint for drug activity. A short time later, Yammara is with Laverde when the drug runner is murdered, and Yammara is also hit by a bullet. He is both angered and intrigued by Laverde's murder and wants to find out the mystery behind his life. His curiosity leads him circuitously to Laverde's relationship with Elena, his American wife, whose death in a plane accident Laverde was grieving over at the time of his murder. Yammara meets Maya Fritts, Laverde's daughter by Elena, who fills in some of the gaps in Yammara's knowledge, and the intimacy that arises from Yammara's growing knowledge of Laverde's family leads him and Maya to briefly become lovers. Toward the end of the novel, Yammara comments that Maya wrinkles her brow "like someone who's on the verge of understanding something," and this ambiguous borderland where things don't quite come into coherent focus is where most of the characters remain.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
