The Sound of Things Falling

Product Information

Stated Bentivegna: “When Cristina brought The Sound Of Things Falling to my attention last year, I was immediately captivated by it. There have been several books, films and TV shows that attempt to tell the dark past of Colombian’s drug trade. Few, in my opinion, do so as poetically and evocatively as Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s masterpiece. It is a story about people, first and foremost – and a wonderful opportunity to depict a “Latin Noir” in the vein of the 70s existential thrillers I love.” What I do remember about that day is that he didn’t strike me as intimidating: he was so thin that he seemed taller than he actually was, and you had to see him standing beside a cue to see that he was barely five foot seven; his thin mousy hair and his dried-out skin and his long, dirty nails gave an impression of illness or laziness, like land gone to waste. He’d just turned forty-eight, but he looked much older. There is a sound that I cannot or have never been able to identify: a sound that's not human or is more than human, the sound of lives being extinguished...the sound of things falling from on high...that is forever suspended in my memory, hanging in it like a towel on a hook." As Yammara struggles with post-traumatic stress after his "accident" (a medic tells him that "the libido is the first to go"), his marriage to a former student wobbles. His growing connection with Laverde's daughter Maya, a seductive bee-keeping recluse, suggests the bond shared by peers who grew up in fear in the 1980s and early 90s, a time of assassinations and terrorist bombings. Only one incident, involving a pet armadillo, stretches credulity in what is a heartfelt account of the trauma suffered by a generation.

From the opening paragraph of The Informers, I felt myself under the spell of a masterful writer. Juan Gabriel Vásquez has many gifts—intelligence, wit, energy, a deep vein of feeling—but he uses them so naturally that soon enough one forgets one's amazement at his talents, and then the strange, beautiful sorcery of his tale takes hold.”— Nicole Krauss Chilling…The past is a shadow-bound, elusive creature in [ The Informers]… When pursued it may flee, or, if cornered, it may unleash terrible truths.”— Los Angeles Times a b c d Alison Flood (12 June 2014). "Impac Dublin award goes to Juan Gabriel Vásquez". The Guardian . Retrieved June 16, 2014.A continuation to Sceneries (released in 2017), Sceneries II shares the same idea in capturing a imaginary natural landscape through musical means. These are not positive developments, they have tremendous costs in personal misery, and they are much to be deplored. Vásquez does his deploring by focusing tightly on the emotional and psychic costs of civil failure to a small group of friends, Antonio's friends and his good self. It's a sad, sad chronicle of horror and rage. And it's wrapped in beautiful words expressing solidly grounded truths: Anne McLean has translated works by many Spanish and Latin American authors including Hector Abad, Carmen Martín Gaite, Julio Cortázar, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Enrique Vila-Matas, Tomás Eloy Martínez and Juan Gabriel Vásquez.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. Il volo Aviana 203 era un volo nazionale partito dall’aeroporto di Bogotá-El Dorado diretto all’aeroporto Alfondo Bonilla Aragón di Calì, Colombia: il 27 novembre 1989 un ordigno esplose 5 minuti dopo il decollo. La bomba piazzata vicino ai serbatoi del carburante esplose incendiando i vapori di carburante presenti in un serbatoio vuoto. L'esplosione divise l'aereo in due parti: la punta dalla coda, e le due sezioni caddero a terra in fiamme. Tutti i 107 passeggeri morirono nell'esplosione e altre 3 persone vennero uccise dai detriti caduti a terra. Secondo le investigazioni la bomba fu caricata all'interno dell'aereo da un uomo in giacca e cravatta, il quale era riuscito a portare la bomba all'interno della propria valigetta. Il candidato presidente César Gaviria, che Escobar voleva eliminare, non era però salito sull’aereo. In una Colombia che ancora soffre per le ferite delle stragi degli anni ’80 su cui ancora aleggia la figura di Pablo Escobar. Vásquez is “one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature,” according to Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, and The Sound of Things Falling is his most personal, most contemporary novel to date, a masterpiece that takes his writing—and will take his literary star—even higher.

No sooner does he get to know Ricardo Laverde in a seedy billiard hall in Bogotá than Antonio Yammara realises that the ex-pilot has a secret. Antonio's fascination with his new friend's life grows until the day Ricardo receives a mysterious, unmarked cassette. This is what makes this book so good. We fall for the story, wonder about our narrator Yammara, and want a proper outcome. But life changes that. Del perché mi sia ritrovata a leggere un romanzo così intriso di morte ed ineluttabile destino, ancora non lo so. C’è un rumore, che non riesco, e non ci sono mai riuscito, a riconoscere: un rumore che non è umano è più che umano, il rumore delle vite che finiscono ma anche il rumore dei materiali che si rompono. È il rumore delle cose che cadono da quell’altezza, un rumore interrotto e dunque eterno, un rumore che non finisce più, che continua a risuonarmi nella testa da quel pomeriggio e non accenna a voler andarsene, che è sospeso per sempre nella mia memoria, appeso come un asciugamano al suo gancio.” Unlike anything written by his Latin American contemporaries. If there is any prevailing influence in this chilling work, it is in the late German writer, W.G. Sebald…The Informers deserves to be read…[O]ne of this year’s outstanding books.”— The Financial Times

Composed, arranged, performed and produced by Xiyu in his personal studio in State College, PA, Madison, WI, and Guiyang, China, between 2019 and 2023. Le cose che cadono introdotte dal titolo sono un aereo passeggeri, uno di quelli grossi e affollati, che prima dell’atterraggio a Calì (Colombia) esplode perché Pablo Escobar vuole eliminare un avversario (uno dei pochi politici che non era riuscito a comprare). 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. [3] Reception [ edit ] Through the book, Vasquez wanted to “show how the drug trade affects somebody not involved in it, somebody who – like me – has never seen a gramme of coke in his life.” That is precisely what he achieves so eloquently in Falling. Antonio finds his life “molded by distant events” and the attendant feeling of disillusionment feels heartbreakingly real. The players caught up in the drug wars were not innocent, they were innocents. Vasquez writes, “I’m not sure you realize what a distance there is between the two concepts.” Thanks to this moving novel, we now do... continuedAn exploration in the ways in which stories profoundly impact our lives." -- Publishers Weekly, STARRED The Sound of Things Falling study guide contains a biography of Juan Gabriel Vásquez, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. An intimate portrayal of the drug wars in Colombia, f rom international fiction star Juan Gabriel Vasquez.

Masterful...Vásquez has much in common with Roberto Bolaño.... But unlike Bolaño's stolid, serviceable prose, Vásquez's style is musical, occasionally even lush, and its poeticism remains unmuddled in McLean's translation." -- Bookforum Juan Gabriel Vasquez is a considerable writer. The Sound of Things Falling is an artful, ruminative mystery... And the reader comes away haunted by its strong playing out of an irreversible fate." -- E. L. Doctorow Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. As Antonio reflects on the unsuspected intensity of his memories, which are “just now beginning to emerge like an object falling from the sky”, he thinks: “My contaminated life was mine alone: my family was still safe: safe from the plague of my country, from its afflicted recent history: safe from what had hunted me down along with so many of my generation (and others, too, yes, but most of all mine, the generation that was born with planes, with the flights full of bags and the bags of marijuana, the generation that was born with the War on Drugs and later experienced the consequence).” Chilling...The past is a shadow-bound, elusive creature in [ The Informers]... When pursued it may flee, or, if cornered, it may unleash terrible truths." -- Los Angeles Times

Multigenerational Identity - "But if you really want to know who Ricardo Laverde was, start there." Laverde's daughter Maya invites Antonio to read a magazine article about the time Ricardo's father, still a boy, joined his father (Ricardo's grandfather), a pilot, a much decorated hero of Colombia's Air Force, at a 1938 air show that unraveled into disaster. Haunting…Vasquez brilliantly and sensitively illuminates the intimate effects and whispers of life under siege, and the moral ambiguities that inform survival.” – Cleveland Plain Dealer