The Sound of Things Falling

Synopsis

The Sound of Things Falling is the story of a law professor named Antonio Yammara, who narrates the novel. Scenes switch between the 1990s Bogotá (the present), where everything is falling apart as the result of the drug wars, and the past where the drug trade seem interwoven into everyone's lives.

In the present, Antonio and his friend Ricardo Laverde are shot in a drive-by shooting. Ricardo dies and Antonio is severely wounded. Antonio became racked with fear causing his marriage to Aura to crumble. He is contacted by Ricardo's daughter Maya, who tells her estranged father's story: he was a pilot who was caught smuggling drugs into the United States and given a 19-year jail sentence. Maya's mother had returned to her native United States when Maya turned 18, and died in a plane crash when attempting to visit Maya and Ricardo after he got out of jail. As the novel progresses, Antonio and Maya are drawn together, united by their tragic pasts.

Vásquez wrote The Sound of Things Falling to explore how the drug trade affects those not involved in it, but forced to live in areas where drug cartels exercise considerable power. He drew on his own personal experience, "remembering for the first time what it was like to grow up during the drug wars", for inspiration. While writing he realized "I was doing something which hadn't been done before. We had all grown up used to the public side of the drug wars, to the images and killings ... but there wasn't a place to go to think about the private side ... How did it change the way we behaved as fathers and sons and friends and lovers, how did it change our private behavior?"

Publication

El ruido de las cosas al caer was published in Spanish in 2011. It was subsequently translated into English by Anne McLean and published by Riverhead Books in 2013.

Reception

Writing for The New York Times, Edmund White called The Sound of Things Falling a "gripping novel, absorbing right to the end". He described it as a "brilliant" work featuring "the bitter poetry of Bogotá and the hushed intensity of young married love" and "well imagined, original and rounded" characters. Also writing for The New York Times, Dwight Garner remarks "Vásquez is an estimable writer. His prose ... is literate and dignified." He said that parts the book "quickens beautifully and sweeps us aloft" but at other times it is "remote, portentous, burped shut". He blamed translation for some awkward metaphors and said Vásquez is a talented writer but "sometimes seems more interested in poetic generalities than in squirming people."

Awards

El ruido de las cosas al caer won the 2011 Alfaguara Prize.

In 2014, the English translation of The Sound of Things Falling won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, at €100,000 one of the world's richest literary awards. It was nominated for the prize by the Biblioteca Daniel Cosío Villegas, one of 150 libraries across 38 countries that provide the annual nomination list. The judging panel called the novel a "consummate literary thriller" with "a masterly command of layered time periods, spiraling mysteries and a noir palette". Vásquez won 75% of the €100,000 prize, with the other 25% going to McLean. Vásquez said he would use to prize to keep reading and writing books. He is the first South American to win the prize, and The Sound of Things Falling is the second novel after A Heart So White originally written in Spanish to win it.