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A review by stevienlcf
The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
3.0
The Sound of Things Falling opens in 2009 with the narrator, a young, disaffected law professor, Antonio Yammara, reading a magazine article in which he learns that a marauding hippopotamus that had escaped from drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s private zoo had been shot and killed. Antonio then ruminates on a cautious friendship that he had formed with the middle-aged Ricardo Laverde. The two men had met in a Bogota billiards hall when Ricardo struck up a conversation about his concern for the animals starving in Escobar’s zoo. Antonio is present several months later when Ricardo listens to a black box recording of a doomed plane carrying his long-estranged wife from Miami to Cali, and is then gravely wounded while witnessing Ricardo being shot dead by masked men on motorcycles.
Learning why Ricardo was assassinated becomes Antonio’s obsession, and his investigation takes him backwards through Ricardo’s history and forward into its consequences. Antonio meets with Ricardo’s adult daughter, Maya Fritts, who is attempting to reconstruct her father’s life. Maya explains that her American mother had come to Bogota in 1969 as a Peace Corp worker, and had met Ricardo when his family served as her local host. Ricardo’s plan to restore his family’s faded glory caused him to use his piloting skills to smuggle drugs during the 1970s. He was arrested by DEA agents and served a lengthy prison sentence. In his absence, Maya’s mother constructed a world in which Ricardo no longer existed, and Maya become one of hundreds of “fictitious orphans,” whose fathers were drug traffickers jailed in the United States.
Although Vasquez shows the impact on individual lives destroyed by drugs, his canvas his larger. He depicts an entire nation weary from the corruption and crime wrought by narcoterrorism that began with the rise of Escobar in the late 1970s. As Antonio muses, “how many traversed their teenage years and fearfully became adults while the city around them sank into fear and the sound of gunshots and bombs without anyone’s having declared any war, or at least not a conventional war, if such thing exists. That’s what I’d like to know, how many left my city feeling in one way or another that they were saving themselves, and how many felt that by saving themselves they were betraying something. . . .”
Learning why Ricardo was assassinated becomes Antonio’s obsession, and his investigation takes him backwards through Ricardo’s history and forward into its consequences. Antonio meets with Ricardo’s adult daughter, Maya Fritts, who is attempting to reconstruct her father’s life. Maya explains that her American mother had come to Bogota in 1969 as a Peace Corp worker, and had met Ricardo when his family served as her local host. Ricardo’s plan to restore his family’s faded glory caused him to use his piloting skills to smuggle drugs during the 1970s. He was arrested by DEA agents and served a lengthy prison sentence. In his absence, Maya’s mother constructed a world in which Ricardo no longer existed, and Maya become one of hundreds of “fictitious orphans,” whose fathers were drug traffickers jailed in the United States.
Although Vasquez shows the impact on individual lives destroyed by drugs, his canvas his larger. He depicts an entire nation weary from the corruption and crime wrought by narcoterrorism that began with the rise of Escobar in the late 1970s. As Antonio muses, “how many traversed their teenage years and fearfully became adults while the city around them sank into fear and the sound of gunshots and bombs without anyone’s having declared any war, or at least not a conventional war, if such thing exists. That’s what I’d like to know, how many left my city feeling in one way or another that they were saving themselves, and how many felt that by saving themselves they were betraying something. . . .”