The Sound of Things Falling

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There have been several books, films and TV shows that attempt to tell the dark past of Colombian’s drug trade. 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 his literary star—even higher. His obsession with understanding what happened takes him on a journey into Colombia's war-torn past. Repressed memories surface when Antonio, now fast approaching 40, reads about the hunting down of a hippo that has escaped from Escobar's zoo in the Magdalena valley.

It's the story of a strange friendship between two men, Antonio and Ricardo, told through Antonio's eyes.Born in 1949 to a school teacher and a farmer, Pablo Escobar grew up in the suburbs of Medellin ( pronunciation) and turned to a life of crime early on. Yammara is a youngish professor of law in Bogotá, and, generally bored, he spends his nights bedding his students and playing billiards. Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s previous books include the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner and national bestseller The Sound of Things Falling, as well as the award-winning Reputations, The Informers, The Secret History of Costaguana, and the story collection Lovers on All Saints' Day. In this gorgeously wrought, award-winning novel, Vásquez confronts the history of his home country, Colombia.

com/the-sound-of-things-falling/study-guide/analysis in MLA Format Anonymous "The Sound of Things Falling Study Guide: Analysis". L. Doctorow and many others From a global literary star comes a prize-winning tour de force an intimate portrayal of the drug wars in Colombia. 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.It's the sound of things falling from on high, an interrupted and somehow also eternal sound, a sound that didn't ever end, that kept ringing in my head from that very afternoon and still shows no sign of wanting to leave it, that is forever suspended in my memory, hanging in it like a towel on a hook. The catalyst for memory here is perhaps unique in the history of the novel, for Yammara begins by recounting an anecdote involving a hippopotamus that had escaped from a zoo established in Colombia’s Magdalena Valley by the drug baron Pablo Escobar. As he investigates, he discovers the many ways in which his own life and his friend's family have been shaped by his country's recent violent past. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. In that aspect it was perfect - anecdotes, customs, I was soon absorbed in this Bogotá and was involved in the characters' story almost instantly.

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. 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 self-conscious and read a few reviews with low ratings.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. The novel won the 2011 Alfaguara Award, and the 2013 English translation by Anne McLean won the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Le cose che cadono sono le vite che precipitano, spariscono nel nulla, e fanno rumore, probabilmente un ronzio simile a quello delle api che Maya coltiva a La Dorada ( ero sola, ero rimasta sola, non c’era più nessuno tra me e la morte. The novel elucidates with great acuity the complex relationship between memory and trauma, the "benefits or possible penalties" of revisiting the past, a theme powerfully explored in Vásquez's previous work, The Secret History of Costaguana and The Informers.

Yammara meets Maya Fritts, Laverde’s daughter by Elena, who fills in some of the gaps in Yammara’s knowledge, and the intimacy that arises from Yammara’s growing knowledge of Laverde’s family leads him and Maya to briefly become lovers. A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. The Colombian author told an interviewer he was stuck writing his story with allusions to Pablo Escobar and the drug world but then he read a newspaper article about an escaped hippopotamus from the zoo built by the cocaine king during the mid-1980s when Don Pablo enjoyed phenomenal wealth and power. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.Such questions are at the heart of this compelling, beautifully translated novel set in Colombia in the turbulent era of the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar. Although Antonio claims that he and Ricardo are not friends, the nature of their relationship quickly becomes closer and Ricardo begins to confide in Antonio. The Secret History of Costaguana is a cunning tribute to a classic, but it also stands on its own merits as a dense and involving story about men who are either manipulating history or finding themselves at the barrel-end of it.