According to the published information about him, 'Vasquez (41) studied at the Sorbonne, and in addition to his years in Paris, has also lived in the Ardennes in Belgium and Barcelona, before returning to his birthplace, Bogotá, to settle.
He became internationally established on the publication of his coolly assured, historical thriller The Informers in 2008, which drew on a marginalised Nazi witch hunt as its inspiration. The Secret History of Costaguana (2007; English translation 2010) is the story of an angry man who believes that Joseph Conrad stole his life.
The Sound of Things Falling is a hard-edged narrative influenced by the legacy of drug trafficking in Colombia. It is an emphatically contemporary work, independent of the influence of magical realism that has tended to define Latin American fiction.
In
Vásquez’s book, the narrator, Yammara, a young lawyer, becomes
seriously wounded when in the company of an acquaintance, a former drugs
trafficker. Yammara has other problems, however, and becomes intent on
finding out what kind of a man he has become. In order to do so, he must
not only examine himself, he must investigate his country’s past.
Chance
plays a central part in the story. Adopting the role of a keen
anthropologist Vásquez pieces together various events, including two
dramatic plane crashes balanced against the image of a hippopotamus
escaped from the bizarre zoo created by drug baron Pablo Escobar in the Magdalena Valley.
The
photograph of the animal shot dead by captors in 2009 reminded Vásquez
of seeing the body of Escobar collapsed on a roof after the shoot out
that ended his life.'
Sound interesting?
