Book Review: 'Sound of Things Falling' confronts Colombia's raw history
'Sound of Things Falling' confronts Colombia's raw history
Colombia's turmoil in the wake of drugs and violence is movingly captured in Juan Gabriel Vasquez's new novel.
By Hector Tobar
July 26, 2013, 11:00 a.m.
Long before Mexico descended into its "drug war," the phrase itself was invented in another country. In the 1980s the underground industry that processed coca into cocaine and shipped it northward to U.S. consumers transformed Colombian society. It created powerful drug barons who became public villains and icons, and it saw a country and its public institutions nearly consumed by a culture of violence.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez's deeply affecting and closely observed new novel takes up the psychic aftermath of that era, as residents of Colombia's capital, Bogota, struggle to make sense of the disorder and dysfunction that's enveloped their daily lives.
"Nobody warned me Bogota was going to be like this," says one of the characters, an American woman who arrives in the heady days of the late 1960s, even before the worst of the craziness truly begins.
"The Sound of Things Falling" is the Colombian writer's second novel, and it begins with the classic detached and dreamlike tone of the Latin American short story masters Borges and Cortázar. Our narrator is Antonio Yammara, a law professor who haunts the billiard clubs in central Bogota. He tells us his life is about to be changed forever by an encounter with one of the lonely regulars there.
More:
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-juan-gabriel-vasquez-20130728,0,4295435.story
