The Sound of Things Falling - Hardcover

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1408825791 ISBN 13: 9781408825792

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012

Synopsis

No sooner does he get to know Ricardo Laverde than disaffected young Colombian lawyer Antonio Yammara realises that his new friend has a secret, or rather several secrets. Antonio's fascination with the life of ex-pilot Ricardo Laverde begins by casual acquaintance in a seedy Bogotá billiard hall and grows until the day Ricardo receives a cassette tape in an unmarked envelope. Asking Antonio to find him somewhere private to play it, they go to a library. The first time he glances up from his seat in the next booth, Antonio sees tears running down Laverde's cheeks; the next, the ex-pilot has gone.

Shortly afterwards, Ricardo is shot dead on a street corner in Bogotá by a guy on the back of a motorbike and Antonio is caught in the hail of bullets. Lucky to survive, and more out of love with life than ever, he starts asking questions until the questions become an obsession that leads him to Laverde's daughter. His troubled investigation leads all the way back to the early 1960s, marijuana smuggling and a time before the cocaine trade trapped a whole generation of Colombians in a living nightmare of fear and random death.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez is one of the leading novelists of his generation, and The Sound of Things Falling that tackles what became of Colombia in the time of Pablo Escobar is his best book to date.

About this title

Review

A powerful, humane novel about a man trying to make sense of a war he didn't choose to fight (Kate Saunders, The Times)

Compelling ... He holds his narrative together with admirable stylistic control as he shows a world falling apart and the powers of love and language to rebuild it (Anita Sethi, Observer)

A piece of Latin American literary noir that lays bare the costs of the drug trade ... In a return to the thriller form of Vásquez's superb The Informers ... A heartfelt account of the drama suffered by a generation ... Vásquez offers no polemic. Yet as debates on the legalisation of drugs remain weighted towards suffering in consumer countries, this novel affords a rare understanding of the inhuman cost on the other side (Maya Jaggi, Guardian)

The Sound of Things Falling has a strikingly idiosyncratic tone: wistful, elegiac almost, but not at all sentimental ... beautifully written (Irish Times)

Enigmatic (Boyd Tonkin, Independent Books of the Year)

The work reads beautifully. Vasquez's persistence in exploring the darker corners of his country's history, in probing his characters' intractable duality, and in questioning the frailties of memory, is compounded by his skill in evoking those instances when things change forever: such as when the telephone rings

(Independent)

The story is compelling but through Vásquez's vivid prose (rendered brilliantly into English by the award-winning translator Anne McLean) it also becomes haunting . A poignant and perturbing tale about the inheritance of fear in a country scrabbling to regain its soul (Financial Times)

Aided by the characteristic excellence of Anne McLean's translation, memories, multiple ironies and descriptive passages of stunning force flow effortlessly into each other, so much so that you wonder how much longer Vasquez is going to be able to maintain the intensity. Admirers of Vásquez will expect of him such verbal virtuosity. But there is an additional emotional element to The Sound of Things Falling that takes this novel to a higher level (Daily Telegraph)

There is much to enjoying Vásquez's latest book (admirably rendered in English by Anne McLean). His intense, intricate prose is far removed from the pyrotechnics of an earlier generation of Latin American novelists. It seeks to bring the topics dealt with by Colombian writers solidly into the mainstream. His probing of the interaction between private worlds and public events is reminiscent of Philip Roth (Times Literary Supplement)

Celebrated Colombian Juan Gabriel Vásquez's latest novel brings to the fore the full, tragic force of the drugs trade on those in the source countries in this captivating Latin American noir . The sense of loss and melancholy are superbly held in a novel that explores the pain and release to be found in revisiting the past (Metro)

Book Description

The dark, brilliant new novel by the author of The Informers and The Secret History of Costaguana.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1408825791
• ISBN 13: 9781408825792
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320