Peruse O Barulho Das Coisas Ao Cair Conceived By Juan Gabriel Vásquez Released As Ebook
ambience of this melancholy novel often appeared in my dreams at night while I was reading this book, I am not sure how longlasting the effect will be, but it has put me into a funk, This is a quiet novel depicting the solitary interior life of a ruined generation, There are frequent pleasures I really enjoyed the descriptions of the Laverde family, urban life up in the mountains in Bogotá contrasted with the rural tropical areas, the beautiful geography of Colombia and inferring some of the broader changes that took place between thes through to thes.
This is an enjoyable novel however, there is something selfish about writing a book that leaves the reader feeling so alone,
Update two months later: I never know if the novel I just finished will linger in my thoughts for weeks, months or if it will quickly fade from my memory.
Two months later, however, when the emotional impact of most novels have long passed, I am still occasionally looking longingly out a window, imagining the beauty of Bogota,
.stars. Ha, damn. Who knew it'd take such a quiet and introspective novel to break my heart,
I'm sorry because my fangirling probably won't help, but I found sitelinkJuan Gabriel Vásquez's storytelling just wonderful, As often when I fall in love with a book especially when none of my friends have read it, I've been feeling a little selfconscious and read a few reviews with low ratings.
I don't advise doing that, lol, In the end, I'm not able to acknowledge the flaws pointed there too much telling rather than showing because I just did not see that, Shrugs.
My experience with sitelinkThe Sound of Things Falling was :
opened the book
started reading
couldn't stop because really, how could I!
It takes a great author to lift us out of our every day scenery and make us feel like we're there without smashing us under the weight of too heavy descriptions.
In that aspect it was perfect anecdotes, customs, I was soon absorbed in this Bogotá and was involved in the characters' story almost instantly, I couldn't stop reading even exhausted, I couldn't put it down, even atin the morning, I had to know, to devour it,
My heart in my throat, and the worry, the worry the passion brought me to this albeit quite ridiculous, but not less valid at the time epiphany when I wanted to yell that THIS WAS WHY I WANTED TO READ BOOKS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD I did not.
It wasin the morning, I am not an animal My lassitude with US settings has never been so clear than then, when I wanted nothing more than
learn again and again about another country, another history, even fictionalized.
sitelinkJuan Gabriel Vásquez's talent for weaving the threads of his characters' lives and attach the reader in the process forcefully doomed me to care for his characters, no matter how great my disagreement with their actions could be and disagree I did.
That's okay. I quickly understood the role I was meant to take : I wasn't there to love them, I was there to slowly unpack their memories and maybe, maybe, above the solitude and nostalgia, find a little place in myself for them.
Spoiler alert : I did,
Antonio, Elaine, Ricardo every one of these characters is flawed and unlikeable at times, I can see how their behavior could alienate some readers but in all honesty I understood them, especially Ricardo whose smile I'd protect with my life MY HEART.
As for the plot, I genuinely think that we should go in blind as I did that's why I won't develop it, I didn't even read the blurb, only picked it because it was part of my translated books list, and I could not recommend doing the same strongly enough,
I'd recommend this novel to every reader who loves family sagas whose secrets, no matter how trivial, shape the characters into these real people we care about.
sitelinkThe Sound of Things Falling is not some actionpacked journey getting us from point A to point B : this is rather a very character driven novel, a fucking train wreck where solitude and nostalgia pour through every page and I am not okay.
Not a perfect book by any means Elaine's Americanism sure annoyed me a lot, for one yet if you know me, then you're well aware that I can overtake a few flaws if I am certain as much one can be certain of anything, that goes without saying that the book I just closed will linger.
Well I believe that I won't forget sitelinkThe Sound of Things Falling anytime soon, Oh, no.
TW : One scene contains cruelty towards an animal, Also, drugs.
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sitelinkAgainst the backdrop of an explosive and defining period in history Pablo Escobar and the powerful Columbian drug cartels, the declaration of the War on Drugs, the growing cocaine epidemic following the Viet Nam war Vasquez has set an amazing story that is immediately gripping.
With only his words, Vasquez is a sculptor, a painter, a master story teller talking to our senses, filling our heads with journals and scrapbooks, maps taped to newspaper articles, the recollections of smugglers flying their illegal cargo, broken hearted confessionals, drug fueled delusions, doomed hopes and loves,.
. . and hippos. An intricate story of the interconnectedness of different people and different times, seamlessly flowing through a world of paradoxical beauty,
. . In, drug lord Pablo Escobar, the seemingly omnipotent and vicious head of the Madellin cartel, importedAfrican hippos from New Orleans to be exhibits in his extravagant private zoo.
After he was gunned down in ', the government took possession of most of the animals, leaving just a few of the heavy, and difficult to transport, hippos behind.
The remaining hippos, which multiplied to a sizeable herd, basked in the lakes Escobar had also constructed, while the once resplendent zoo around them fell into disrepair, In, a pair of those hippos, Pepe and Matilda, wandered away from the derelict zoo and into local legendom, The corpulent mates seemed to have disappeared untilwhen they were photographed, justmiles from the zoo site, pastorally grazing in tall river grass with a small calf by their sidesdubbed Pepito.
The photos sparked stories of marauding hippos terrorizing villagers, stampeding and devouring crops, killing livestock, You might even remember the NY Times articles on the hippos, or the coverage on TV nightly news, The government, who had many years earlier created a small panic by doing hippobreedingmath and predicting a problematic hippo invasion, responded by circulating stories of the diseases the Artiodactyla carried.
Soon,WANTED: HIPPOS posters went up throughout Columbia giving rise to the opposing game hunters and the Save the Hippos factions, .
Antonio Yammara has just finished reading about the final chapter of PePe's life in a newsmagazine, He examines a photo of the hunters standing over the corpse of the nearlyton black hippo a squad described by the NY Times, Sept,, ': "Even in Colombia, a country known for its paramilitary death squads, this hunting party stood out: more than a dozen soldiers from a Colombian Army battalion, two Porsche salesmen armed with longrange rifles, their assistant, and a taxidermist.
" the article and picture is archived and can be looked up, Included in the article was a procedural description of the dismemberment, and the necessary onsite burial of parts of the giant animal, as well as plans to continue the hunt for the remaining members of this hippo family that fled stealthily as hippos are wont to do away as the larger hippo was being taken down.
Beyond and expected sadness to the article, a familiar sense of melancholy spreads through Antonio, Even after his death on the Medellin rooftops, the echoes of Escobar's greed and violence echo from his grave, . .
But, this is not the story of Escobar, or his drug cartel, or of hippos,
The memories unlock in Antonio an emotional link to an old mysterious friend, and Antonio fades away again into dark memories, recalling the series of events that seemed to fall out of the sky when that friend entered his life, and lay before him his own tragic path.
Unable to thrust himself out from a crippling cycle of PTSD PostTraumatic Stress Disorder, Antonio is obsessed with connecting the events and people, and with answering some tenacious existential questions that have plagued him.
The story begins in medias res Antonio at a point in his life where the past compels him to find answers in the future, and at all costs, The title is a metaphorical reference toairplane disasters that tightly connect one time to another, and align the characters, And it references the global dissonance of values, cultures, and hopes colliding with failure, A tumultuous time in history, but as Antonio says, the grievous story is not exclusive to him or the times, "It has happened before and it will happen again.
"
It is in a smaller sense, a story of the effects of the war on drugs and the people involved the fruits of violence, greed, and poverty and an era where the hopes of peace and love proved flawed and crashed and burned.
On a larger scale, there is the universal theme of connection that the dissonance of the past reverberates throughout time and people, The human lives pinned against the "tide of historical events," are the carriers of the psychic wounds, and very often, the price of keeping the meticulous balance of the scales of justice unjustly falls on the fragile shoulders of the innocent.
. . even the hippos.
Vasquez burrows deep into a tormented soul and takes the reader along, then leaves us with this thought, . . "who worries about us when we don't show up, and who can go out and look for us, " Throughout this forceful novel I subconsciously resisted associating with such heavy pain, both physical and existentially, Even days after I finished, I was discouraged, trying to organize my feelings and find footage, It wasn't until I got the rebound whack to the head from this boomerang of a book that I realized that I was so blindly affected by the book and was still crawling out of dark places.
. . that's what I call being lost in a book,
.