Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather sympathy we learn to feel for the pain of others.I was reading an online article about a traumatised police officer who committed suicide last week and was struck by this comment that another reader posted: "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder isn't a mental illness, it's a psychological injury -- and those suffering from it deserve and require as much medical treatment as those who sustain physical injuries". I had never considered that before: We certainly wouldn't stand by while a cop who had been shot was obliged to walk around with a bullet in his leg. But how do you care for an entire generation that's suffering from PTSD -- as are the bogotanos who grew up with assassinations and bombings during Pablo Escobar's reign -- how do you heal those wounds? When the main character of The Sound of Things Falling, Antonio Yammara, is shot during the drive-by murder of his new and little-known friend, Ricardo, we get an intimate look at how such psychological injuries affect individual lives and whole communities.
The Sound of Things Falling recently won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (among other honours), so I was expecting a knockout reading experience. Right from the start, with the newspaper story about shooting a hippo that had escaped from Escobar's famed personal zoo -- they posed with the dead body, the great dark wrinkled mass, a recently fallen meteorite -- I was immediately intrigued and primed with anticipation…but it never paid off for me. There were many such poetic bits, much intriguing and quotable philosophy -- There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken -- but the pacing was very low key, in mid-book becomes the story of different characters, and I lost whatever emotional connection I had been forging with Antonio.
At one point, noting that Elaine's name is the same as the daughter's in The Graduate -- and seeing as both are the subjects of forbidden love -- the novel says, "that must mean something, wasn't it too much of a coincidence"? I took that as a signal from the author, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, to look for meaning in coincidence, and there are many in this book (or if not coincidence, at least significant parallels). Pregnant Elaine lays in a hotel pool "tricking gravity" and pregnant Aura sits in the tub, "that happy, weightless world" (and are these comments on gravity as the enemy; the ultimate cause of plane crashes?). Aura says Antonio's fear is "contagious" for Leticia and Ricardo recalls, "My grandfather passing a hand over Dad's scar on his face and telling him not to make me catch his fears." Aura and Antonio/Elaine and Ricardo are both forbidden loves. Elaine has an irrational fear of a plane crash on her first flight to Colombia. Maya was raised in Bogotá but refuses to ever return, while Aura was taken from Bogotá as a child but now studies law there to compel herself to stay. But while there were these many parallels, nothing really made the leap to dramatic irony, and therefore, didn't seem to have greater meanings.
That leaves just the plot for me to evaluate and, despite the danger inherent in shootings and drug dealers and plane crashes, this wasn't an exciting book. The pacing was slow (to demonstrate Antonio's numbness?), and when Ricardo's mysterious past was revealed, it wasn't much of a surprise. In this interview with NPR, Vasquez describes his inspiration:
The Sound of Things Falling began with my exploration of this pilot who had smuggled marijuana into the US in the early '70s. But 10 years before I started writing his story, I'd found the transcription of the black box recording of an American Airlines plane that crashed in the Colombian mountains in 1995. Later, I found the letters of an American Peace Corps volunteer who writes home telling his family about that strange place, Colombia. Before that, a friend had told me about her grandmother who was present at an aerial exhibition in the 1930s, which ended in disaster. And in 2009 I found, in a Colombian magazine, a photo of a dead hippo... Things started coming together, or rather writing the novel was the art of putting together things that didn't necessarily belong together.Putting together "things that didn't necessarily belong together" is how all history works, I suppose, and in this book, Vasquez paints a broad picture of Columbia. What I wanted, however, was more specifics: more interior life; more emotion. But, others have chosen The Sound of Things Falling for their fancy awards, so I'm willing to concede that it may have gone over my head.
