The Sound of Things Falling
SynopsisPlot
In the city of Bogotá, Antonio Yammara reads an article about a hippo that had escaped from a derelict zoo once owned by legendary Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The article transports Antonio back to when the war between Escobar’s Medellín cartel and government forces played out violently in Colombia’s streets and in the skies above. Back then, Antonio witnessed a friend’s murder, an event that haunts him still. 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. His journey leads him all the way back to the 1960s and a world on the brink of change: a time before narco-trafficking trapped a whole generation in a living nightmare.
Story
About this book
In Bogotá, a young law professor named Antonio Yammara comes across a news story about a hippopotamus that escaped from a rundown zoo once belonging to Pablo Escobar. The detail pulls him back to the 1990s, when the conflict between the Medellín cartel and the Colombian government spilled into ordinary streets and skies. During that period, Antonio witnessed the killing of a friend, and the event left a permanent fracture in his life.
As Antonio tries to understand what happened, he traces his friend's history and family back to the 1960s, a time when Colombia's relationship with small aviation and the outside world was shifting. The novel follows the way narco-trafficking reshaped not only politics and security but also private lives, marriages, and the choices available to an entire generation. Vásquez builds the story through overlapping timelines, connecting personal grief to decades of national instability.
The book won the International Dublin Literary Award, one of the largest prizes for a single work of fiction published in English. Set across several decades of Colombian history, it uses the stray hippo as both a concrete artifact of the Escobar era and a starting point for Antonio's attempt to piece together a past he has tried to leave behind.
