“And I tell myself at the same time that we're terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn't actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read.”
Like the Chilean novelist and short story writer Roberto
Bolano – often regarded as the most influential Latin American author of his
generation – Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vasquez contemplates the troublesome
history of his nation’s past, its culture of violence, and the political
dysfunction through delicate, dream-like tableau. Mr. Vasquez’ third novel,
The Sound of Things Falling (published 2011 and translated to English by Anne
McLean) is falsely described as a tale exploring the Colombian drug trade. Although
the readers can easily equate the word ‘Colombia’ with drug war (the popular
history of Medellin Cartel and its notorious leader Pablo Escobar has had
profound effect on people around the world) The Sound of Things Falling is
primarily concerned with the trauma of living in a disorderly society where the
past is a black-hole and memories are faulty. Vasquez strongly evokes the sense
of a particular place and its history while universalizing certain aspects of his
deeply introspective characters’ emotions.
In The Sound of Things Falling, Vasquez as usual offers dual narratives; one detailing the existential
anxieties of the narrator, whereas the other intricate tale of an elusive past
begins to gradually invade the emotional landscape of his narrator/protagonist.
The novel opens with the news item of a shooting, not between drug cartel and
paramilitary, but the shooting of a hippopotamus which has escaped from the broken-down
private zoo of cocaine baron Pablo Escobar. The dead hippo and its connection
to Escobar unveil the interior life of the story’s narrator, Antonio Yammara, a
law professor in Bogota approaching 40 years of age. Antonio
remembers the time he visited (when he was 12-years-old) Escobar’s zoo against
the order of his parents. But Antonio is not haunted by his childhood. He tells us
that his life was changed in the mid- 1990s when he befriended a lonely, middle-aged
man named Ricardo Laverde.
Antonio comes across the short and timid Laverde in the
billiards club in central Bogota, since both of the lonely men are regulars
there. Drug-related kidnappings and killings were the order of the day in the
1990s as Vasquez writes, “The violence that’s been ravaging Colombia is not
just savagery of cheap stabbings and stray bullets, the settling of accounts
between low-grade dealers, but rather violence committed by actors whose names
are written with capital letters: the State, the Cartel, the Army, the Front.”
By the time Antonio and Laverde get acquainted with each other, the worst of
the nation’s violence (bombing commercial airlines, assassinating presidential
candidate on live TV) has already become a memory.
Antonio Yammara, the handsome and smart professor belonging
to Colombian intelligentsia, occasionally has an affair with his students. Nevertheless, he later
starts to live with his ex-student Aura who becomes pregnant with his baby daughter, Leticia. Antonio is mildly fascinated by his billiards club friend whom he
learns had made his living as a pilot. One day, Antonio sees Ricardo Laverde
listening to a mysterious, unmarked cassette. Few minutes later, Laverde is
killed in a shooting with Antonio receiving one bullet in his gut.
Antonio is saved physically, but mentally he doesn’t recover
(suffers from PTSD), and gradually becomes obsessed with the life of his dead
friend. Vasquez hints that the post-traumatic stress is a generalized condition
of all Colombia’s citizens as they are still suffering and striving to recover
from the nation’s bloody past. Ricardo Laverde has piloted small aircraft,
carrying cocaine into US soil, for which he has spent more than a decade in
jail. When Antonio receives an invitation from Laverde’s 28-year-old beekeeping
daughter, Maya to visit her at a remote location, he immediately accepts it. In
the trip, Antonio gets to know about Laverde’s life with his American wife
Elaine Fritts, who first arrived at Bogota as a US Peace Corps worker (in the
early 1970s). As Antonio delves deep into the memories of young Laverde’s life,
his present life with his patient wife and lovely little daughter begins to
founder.
Vasques is skillful at tapping into larger themes of
national identity, fatherhood, fear, love, and memory simply through one
individual’s curiosity. The Sound of Things Falling, similar to his other
stories, is an investigation of sorts. Yet the central mystery doesn’t provide
an answer to a earth-shattering secret, but subtly introduces us to the Colombian national character. The author profoundly focuses on the social and psychological impact
of Colombia’s violent past. There are no detailed portraits of drug trade or
the nation’s debilitated political institutions (courtesy of giant neighbor -- US). Vasquez rather intimately showcases the psychological
effect of violence in ordinary Colombian citizens’ life. And there’s undeniable
beauty in the way Vasquez describes how these simple individuals are linked through
history by the violence, fear and uncertainty, passed from fathers to daughters
and so on.
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