The Sound of Things Falling

The Sound of Things Falling begins in Bogotá, Colombia in 2009, where Antonio Yammara reads a news article about a hippopotamus that has gone astray from the private zoo of the late cocaine lord Pablo Escobar. The article leads him back to his memories of Colombia during the eighties and nineties, his near-death in a mafia assassination, and the man who was the real target: Ricardo Laverde, a half-broken man with a murky past and a cassette tape whose mysterious contents may well have been what got him killed.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez is one of the Bogotá 39, South America’s most promising writers of the new generation, and The Sound of Things Falling is evidence of a powerful new voice. With touches of Graham Greene and John le Carré, this taut and kaleidoscopic novel opens up Colombia’s secret and not-so-secret histories, from the cartel violence of the nineties to an air-show tragedy in the thirties, from the urban claustrophobia of Bogotá to the lush tropical valleys of the countryside. Through the voice of his narrator, a disaffected law lecturer scarred, like all his generation, by the pervasive fear and misery of the coca wars, Vásquez ventriloquizes a long and painful story – one that’s as much about youth, love and family as it is about the staggering trauma of the recent Colombian past. The Sound of Things Falling is a novel of Conradian poise, penetration and scope, a portrait of a troubled country, and a coolly agonised examination of what it takes to live, and stay human, amidst the noise and brutality of history.