"The Sound of Things Falling" by Juan Gabriel Vázquez

Up-and-coming Colombian author
Juan Gabriel Vazquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has a new rival as king of Colombian letters. Juan Gabriel Vázquez (canny self-marketing, the similar name) was born in Bogotá in 1973, has had three novels translated into English to date, and has won acclaim from Marío Vargas Llosa and Colm Toíbin, no less. 

After a law degree in Colombia, Vásquez followed the well-trodden path to Paris (and later Barcelona), where he took a Doctorate in Latin American literature at the Sorbonne, translating Victor Hugo and EM Forster into Spanish.  Nominated as one of the “Bogotá 39” (not a protest group but a selection of South America’s most promising ‘new generation’ of writers), his novels have swiftly picked up gongs and helped earn him a place as a columnist on Colombia’s “El Espectador” paper.

‘Los Informantes’ (published in 2004 and translated as ’The Informers’ in 2009) examined Colombia’s murky role in and after the Second World War, as a destination for both Jews and Nazis, focusing on the tensions and dishonesties arising from two such distinct influxes.  ‘Historia secreta de Costaguana’ (published in 2007 and translated as ‘The Secret History of Costaguana’ in 2011) looked back further still, to the building of the Panama Canal in the late Nineteenth Century, through the eyes of an imaginary assistant to Joseph Conrad. (Conrad's fictional country of Costaguana in “Nostromo” bore more than a passing resemblance to Colombia).  Now, hot off the presses (at least in paperback) in the UK and translated by Anne McLean, who also brought us the previous two, there's moody thriller ‘The Sound of Things Falling’ ('El ruido de las cosas al caer’).

'El Jefe', Senor Coca:  Pablo Escobar

While the Eighties in the UK were a time of bad haircuts, brat-pack movies and the occasional riot, in Colombia they were a rather more violent affair.  The chickens of small-scale marijuana-running to Florida in the Seventies came home to roost in the form of industrial-scale cocaine production, serial assassinations and wholesale subversion by Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel.  Vásquez’s literary noir illuminates this period.  It traces, through the story of a murdered fictional small-time crook, how Colombia descended into ‘narco-statedom’ and how survivors of that period struggle to process their memories:

“Now that so many years have passed, now that I remember with the benefit of an understanding I didn't then have, I think of that conversation and it seems implausible that its importance didn't hit me in the face. (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).”

Escobar kept hippos in his personal zoo

It's a well-crafted yarn, with each stage of the story cleverly punctuated by a series of aircraft-related incidents, the “things falling” of the title. Aircraft serve as harbingers of misfortune, signs that things are about to go badly awry, in a way that's begun to seem almost familiar since 9/11. (“Bricks can tumble from clear blue skies”, as Sondheim put it in ‘Merrily’.)  Frequent references to Saint-Exupéry’s “Little Prince” maintain the flying theme.  There are key resemblances of mood and in the use of flashbacks with Vargas Llosa's "Conversation in the Cathedral", though this book is mercifully shorter.

Atmospheric and strong on local colour, surprisingly suspenseful given that the main character is killed off at the outset, its melancholia far-removed from the whimsical side of Latin American magic realism, and blessed with an unforgettable opening, this is a thriller I defy you not to polish off in one sitting.