The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

 


If The Sound of Things Falling, Juan Gabriel Vásquez's novel filled with sadness and beauty, were ever made into a film, Edward Elgar's Elegy for String Orchestra would make the perfect theme music.

The Colombian author told an interviewer he was stuck writing his story with allusions to Pablo Escobar and the drug world but then he read a newspaper article about an escaped hippopotamus from the zoo built by the cocaine king during the mid-1980s when Don Pablo enjoyed phenomenal wealth and power. Reflecting on the tragic incident proved the necessary impetus needed to finish his work. Appropriately, the novel opens with these lines:

"The first hippopotamus, a male the color of black pearls, weighing a ton and a half, was shot dead in the middle of 2009. He'd escaped two years before from Pablo Escobar's old zoo in the Magdalena Valley, and during that time of freedom had destroyed crops, invaded drinking troughs, terrified fishermen, and even attacked the breeding bulls at a cattle ranch."

The tale's narrator, Antonio Yammara, professor of law living in Bogotá, Colombia and rapidly approaching his fortieth birthday, recounts the critical events causing his life to take a dramatic shift, events occurring back when he was in his mid-20s, beginning when he struck up an acquaintance with an older man by the name of Ricardo Laverde.

The Sound of Things Falling is a novel so masterfully well-constructed in its interconnecting past and present, the lives of its characters and their families, historical events in Colombia and the United States, as reviewer, I'm hesitant to reveal too much thus depriving readers of all the many fresh discoveries and revelations made when turning the pages.

Therefore, rather than arc of plot, I'll turn the spotlight on a number of themes that contribute to making this one riveting, heartfelt story.

Personal Transformation - "I didn't yet know that an old Polish novelist had spoken a long time before of the shadow-line, that moment when a young man becomes the proprietor of his own life, but that was what I was feeling while my little girl was growing inside Aura's womb." So reflects Antonio when he joins dear wife Aura at the hospital for her ultrasound and he becomes fully aware he is now the proud father of a baby girl. At this point, little does Antonio Yammara realize his life will shortly undergo irreparable damage, that he will become the victim of extreme violence, caught in the crossfire of a drug gang's turf war.

And, of course, that Polish novelist is none other than Joseph Conrad. Prior to writing The Sound, Juan Gabriel Vásquez published his The Secret History of Costaguana, a novel playing off of Conrad's masterpiece, Nostromo. Also worth noting, The Sound is decidedly not a work of Latin American magical realism a la his fellow countryman Gabriel García Márquez but rather a tale of stark realism, for as the author has stated repeatedly, his literary influences have been European and American.

Multigenerational Identity - "But if you really want to know who Ricardo Laverde was, start there." Laverde's daughter Maya invites Antonio to read a magazine article about the time Ricardo's father, still a boy, joined his father (Ricardo's grandfather), a pilot, a much decorated hero of Colombia's Air Force, at a 1938 air show that unraveled into disaster.

Appreciating and understanding individual identity as part of an intergenerational fabric is very much within the Latin American tradition, much different than in countries like the US where the tendency is to separate, to pull away from one's family history in order to establish an independent, individual identity.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - Following the burst of violence on that fateful day on a street in downtown Bogotá, Antonio's life dips and dips again, leading him to a psychiatrist and eventually to wife Aura giving him a gift "for the both of us." A gift, really? Antonio opens the small package - a purple vibrator or what in Spanish is called a consolador. Antonio's sense of self-worth takes another nosedive.

Pablo Escobar & His Zoo - Like a stone dropped in a pond, the consequences of Don Pablo's cocaine kingdom and the subsequent war on drugs ripple out, touching Colombians for years, for generations. Antonio and Maya visit the former drug lord's now dilapidated zoo, their visit symbolic of much of grim post-Escobar Colombia: "The humid air filled with a dirty smell, a mixture of excrement and rotting food. We saw a cheetah lying at the back of its cage. We saw a chimpanzee scratching its head and another running in circles with nothing to chase. We saw an empty cage, the door open and an aluminum basin leaning against the bars."

The Power of Myth - Frequently men and women will address one another or speak of one another using both first and last names. Reading the novel and listening to the audio book over and over, I had the distinct impression such formality bestows a mythic, archetypal dimension to the tale, very much in the spirit of Ernest Hemingway's use of thee and thou in For Whom the Bell Tolls. For, as Antonio states, his story is one where "as they warn in fairy tales, has happened before and will happen again."

The Sound of Things Falling - The novel's title works on multiple levels: disillusion and dissolving of hopes, of dreams, even the expunging of life, an individual's life as well the vital life of a nation. Since precise language fuels Juan Gabriel Vásquez's saga (special call-out to Anne McLean's superb English translation), it's only fair I allow the author to have the last word - this from Antonio's memory listening to a Black Box recording of a plane crash:

"There is a faltering scream, or something that sounds like a scream. There is a sound that I cannot or have never been able to identify: a sound that's not human or is more than human, the sound of lives being extinguished but also the sound of material things breaking. It's the sound of things falling from on high, an interrupted and somehow also eternal sound, a sound that didn't ever end, that kept ringing in my head from that very afternoon and still shows no sign of wanting to leave it, that is forever suspended in my memory, hanging in it like a towel on a hook. That sound is the last thing heard in the cockpit of Flight 965."


Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez, born 1973