The Sound of Things Falling

Originally published in Spanish in 2011, The Sound of Things Falling is the realist, political thriller novel written by Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vasquez. The novel is set in 2009 Colombia but also flashes back to the past. The story follows law professor Antonio Yammara as he recounts the Colombian drug trade and his violent history under the corrupt regime of kingpin Pablo Escobar. When Antonio’s traumatic past is triggered by a memory, he must confront the many horrors he and his family endured in the 1980s and 1990s when Escobar was in power. This includes unlocking the mystery of Ricardo Laverde, an acquaintance and drug-pilot who was gunned down before Antonio’s eyes. As Antonio searches to uncover the truth about Ricardo’s past, he realizes he can’t escape the countrywide turmoil left in the wake of Pablo Escobar’s reign. The novel won the 2011 Alfaguara Award, and the 2013 English translation by Anne McLean won the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The novel also became a New York Times Bestseller.

Narrated in the first person by Antonio Yammara, the novel begins in 2009 Bogota, Colombia. Antonio teaches law in the capital city. He has a good life, a nice apartment, a wife named Aura, and a baby girl on the way. Antonio reads a newspaper about the present-day assassination of a hippopotamus that escaped from a defunct zoo developed by Pablo Escobar in the Magdalena Valley. This episode triggers Antonio’s repressed memory, and he is taken back thirteen years into the traumatic past, to a time when Colombia was still reeling from Escobar’s violent criminal imprint. In 1996, when Antonio wasn’t sleeping with female students like Aura, who solicited sexual favors for good grades before getting pregnant, he often frequented billiard-rooms. While shooting pool one night, Antonio meets Ricardo Laverde, an ex-pilot fresh out of a nineteen-year prison stint for drug trafficking. Unaware of Ricardo’s criminal past, the two men become closer, despite Antonio insisting that he was never friends with Ricardo, but merely acquaintances.

Ricardo is given a mysterious cassette tape one day and seeks a tape player to listen to it. He finds one in a salon and tells Antonio he has to hear the tape. Ricardo plays the tape, begins to cry, and runs out of the salon. While walking near the pool-hall with Antonio moments later, Ricardo is suddenly gunned down in the street by a man on a motorcycle. Ricardo dies, and Antonio sustains a bullet wound to the stomach. Following the incident, Antonio becomes a shell of his former self. He also becomes obsessed with Ricardo’s mysterious life and sudden death, attempting to uncover all he can about the shadowy figure. Antonio neglects every aspect of his life to do so, and soon his relationship with Aura begins to fizzle. Antonio fears for his life whenever he’s near the pool-hall where he was shot, but persists to find the truth despite severe post-traumatic stress, sexual impotence, and a dependency on pain medication.



Antonio becomes inured to the violence of war-torn Bogota; the constant bombings, assassinations, street attacks, etc. He eventually discovers that Ricardo’s American wife, Elaine Fritts, died in a plane crash and that Ricardo was grieving her death at the time of his murder. The title of the novel refers to this plane crash and others, such as the time Escobar failed to assassinate a president by blowing up an airplane the president was not aboard. Moreover, when Antonio realizes the tape Ricardo played for him was recorded from Elaine’s fatally downed flight, the title’s meaning adds yet another layer. The black box provides Antonio the one clue that could lead to his understanding of Ricardo’s enigmatic life and death.

The novel then jumps back to the 1930s to detail Ricardo’s ace-pilot grandfather, and to the 1960s, when Elaine came to Colombia with the US Peace Corps. The complex history of the Nixon administration is provided to contextualize the Colombian drug trade, which started in earnest when Nixon closed the Mexican border in 1969 to “an invasion of weed.” Ironically, the Peace Corps Americans were the ones who instructed Colombian locals how to grow the most potent coca leaves in the run-up to Nixon’s coinage of “war on drugs” in 1971, and his creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency in 1973. These past asides provide context to illustrate how Colombia is still mired in the violent drug-trade almost forty years later.

Antonio is contacted by Maya Fritts, Elaine and Ricardo’s bee-keeping daughter, who fills in the blanks about Ricardo’s cryptic past. Antonio learns Ricardo was a drug-running pilot for the Escobar cartel and served a nineteen-year prison sentence before they met. When Maya was eighteen, Elaine went back to the United States but died in a plane crash when returning to visit Maya and Ricardo when he was released from jail. The black box Antonio possesses came from this crash. Maya does not know about Antonio’s family in Bogota, which he leaves behind, and soon Antonio and Maya become sexually involved for a brief time. The novel ends with Antonio returning to Bogota to find that Aura has left him and taken their baby with her. Ricardo’s killer is never identified. Antonio’s ruined life is a direct result of his rekindled past, and investigating the impact Escobar and the drug-trade had on his life. The widespread pain of Escobar’s influence on Colombia is felt by those with no direct ties to the trade, even decades after the drug-lord was shot and killed in 1993.



The Sound of Things Falling has been hailed as “genuine and magnificently written” by Library Journal; “deeply affecting and closely observed” by the L.A. Times; and “a masterpiece” by Booklist. It is the fifth novel by Vasquez, following Persona, Alina Suplicante, The Informers, and The Secret History of Costaguana. Vasquez has published two novels since, The Shape of the Ruins and Reputations.