The Sound of Things Falling

Juan Gabriel Vásquez is a Colombian writer and journalist who has published novels, short stories, essays, and poetry. He was born in Bogotá in 1973 and was raised on the northern outskirts of the city. He studied law at the University del Rosario in Bogotá but decided to pursue a career as an author by the time he graduated. He then studied literature at the Sorbonne in Paris but left those studies to devote himself to writing fiction. He completed two early novels—Persona (1997) and Alina suplicante (1999)—that he now considers apprentice works. He married Mariana Montoya in 1999, and the two moved together to Barcelona, where Gabriel Vásquez worked at the magazine Lateral. He published his novel Los informantes (The Informers) in 2004, followed by Historia secreta de Costaguana (The Secret History of Costaguana) in 2010, and El ruido de las cosas al caer (The Sound of Things Falling) in 2013. In 2005, his twin daughters were born. Gabriel Vásquez his family returned to live in Bogotá in 2012. Many of Gabriel Vásquez’s novels address the impacts of greed, corruption, and violence, especially within Colombia. He has received numerous awards for his work and has been named one of the Royal Society of Literature’s International Writers and a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters.

The Sound of Things Falling is about the impacts of decades of drug trafficking-related violence on people within Colombia, much of which was orchestrated by Pablo Escobar. Escobar was the leader of the Medellín Drug Cartel. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Escobar carried out a campaign of public violence to murder and intimidate opponents of his drug trafficking operations. He was behind the bombing of Avianca Flight 203 in 1989, which killed 107 people, and the DAS (Administrative Department of Security) bombing nine days later, which killed 63 people and injured more than 2,000. He also ordered the assassinations of the minister of justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla and the presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán. The Sound of Things Falling charts how persistent violence impacted the psyches and private lives of people in Colombia during that time. The novel also references the beginning of the United States' “war on drugs,” a campaign that, through domestic and international interventions, purportedly aimed to diminish the illegal drug trade. One strategy of the war on drugs was increased U.S. military involvement in Latin American countries, including Colombia, to target suppliers of illegal drugs found in the U.S. Several historians have argued, though, that the war on drugs was used as propaganda to help the U.S. government pursue previously established anti-leftist military operations in countries like Colombia, where the U.S. had preexisting Cold War military operations to oppose the spread of communism. As part of its war on drugs, the U.S. government also founded the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973. In the novel, DEA agents catch Ricardo and arrest him for drug trafficking after he lands a plane with a shipment of cocaine in the U.S.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez is the author of several novels. In addition to The Sound of Things Falling, some of his most well-known works include the novels Retrospective and The Shape of the Ruins. Similar to The Sound of Things Falling, The Shape of the Ruins addresses the impacts of the assassinations of political figures on Colombia’s history, though The Shape of the Ruins is concerned with an earlier time period in Colombia than The Sound of Things Falling. When he first began writing, Gabriel Vásquez was influenced by writers of the Latin American boom, including Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa; Gabriel García Márquez’s most well-known work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is also briefly alluded to in The Sound of Things Falling. Gabriel Vásquez has also called Joseph Conrad an influence, citing Conrad’s devotion to exploring the darkness of individuals’ souls. Gabriel Vásquez also published a Spanish translation of Conrad’s most well-known work, Heart of Darkness, in 2016. Gabriel Vásquez has also cited short story writers Anton Chekhov and Alice Munro as influences. The Sound of Things Falling covers drug trafficking in Colombia from the late 1960s through the 1990s. Robin Kirk’s nonfiction book More Terrible Than Death: Violence, Drugs, and America’s War in Colombia covers a similar time period with an eye toward U.S. military involvement in Colombia related to the war on drugs.