The first sentence of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s new novel, The Sound of Things Falling, involves a hippopotamus killing. This is no ordinary hippo — it escaped from a private zoo that was once owned by the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, and the news of its killing kick-starts a torrent of memories for the narrator Antonio Yammara.
Memory is at the heart of this novel, which is ostensibly a chronicle of Colombia’s 40-year war on drugs. But how does someone who has never seen a gramme of coke in his life write about drugs? “Well, that’s just it,” Juan says, “It’s not only a novel about the drug trade, but also about the effect the drug trade has had on the individual, private lives of my generation. We grew up with an uneasy relationship with drugs, mainly because we suffered extreme moments of violence that were fuelled by the drug trade.”
Juan was born in Bogotá in 1973. His earliest memory of the city is when he was four years old, standing on the window sill of the 7th floor, about to enact his own version of Superman. Unlike Superman, Juan tried to resist his calling, by following the family tradition and going to law school. But then, he said, “the obsession became too powerful”, and that’s when he left Colombia and his unfinished diploma, and did what generations of Latin American writers have done before him — he moved to Paris.
Three novels and many cities later he has returned to Bogotá with his family. The Bogotá he conjures up in The Sound of Things Falling is a city where it never snows, of old men in ponchos and felt hats, houses with clay roof tiles and smoky billiard clubs. It is tangible and gritty, in sharp contrast to the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez. Is it tough to be a young Colombian writer in the shadow of Márquez? “Oh, but I’ve never felt threatened by it,” Juan says. “It’s a nice shadow, like that of a tree. My vocation has always been enriched by the great master’s novels, but my books respond to my own vision of a world very different from that of magical realism.”
The Sound of Things Falling won Spain’s Alfaguara Prize and more recently, Italy’s Premio Gregori von Rezzori. In spirit, it probably owes more to another Latin American genius, Borges, and his labyrinths. Memory, Juan tells me, is his strongest obsession as a novelist. “Even when I leave the public world out of my frame. I’m always concerned with our past experience and the fact, as Faulkner says, that ‘the past is not dead: it’s not even past.’”
Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s great gift as a writer is his ability to manipulate time. He can pin a human life against the tide of historical events, measure individual relationships with the guilt that is necessarily associated with the past, and drag people from other times into our current frame of vision. “We’re terrible judges of the present moment,” he writes, “maybe because the present doesn’t actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read.”
The writer is a dancer, poet and novelist.
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