The Sound of Things Falling (32 page)
Read The Sound of Things Falling Online
Authors: Juan Gabriel Vasquez
I began
The Sound of Things Falling
in June
2008
, during six weeks I spent at the Santa Maddalena Foundation (Donnini, Italy), and would like to thank Beatrice Monti della Corte for her hospitality. I finished the novel in December
2010
, in the house of Suzanne Laurenty (Xhoris, Belgium), and to her also go my grateful thanks. Between the two dates many people enriched and improved this novel. They know who they are.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez was born in Bogotá in
1973
. He studied Latin American Literature at the Sorbonne between
1996
and
1998
, and has translated works by E. M. Forster and Victor Hugo, among others, into Spanish. He was nominated as one of the Bogotá
39
, South America’s most promising writers of the new generation. His previous books include
The Informers
, which was shortlisted for the
Independent
Foreign Fiction Prize, and
The Secret History of Costaguana
, which won the Qwerty Prize in Barcelona. His books have been published in fifteen languages worldwide. After sixteen years in France, Belgium and Spain, he now lives in Bogotá.
Anne McLean has translated Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs and other writings by authors including Hector Abad, Carmen Martín Gaite, Julio Cortázar, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Enrique Vila-Matas and Tomás Eloy Martínez. She has twice won the
Independent
Foreign Fiction Prize: for
Soldiers of Salamis
by Javier Cercas in
2004
(which also won her the Premio Valle Inclán), and for
The Armies
by Evelio Rosero in
2009
. In
2012
she was awarded the Spanish Cross of the Order of Civil Merit in recognition of her contribution to making Spanish literature known to a wider public. She lives in Toronto.
The Informers
The Secret History of Costaguana
The Informers
‘From the opening paragraph of
The Informers
, I felt myself under the spell of a masterful writer’ Nicole Krauss
When Gabriel Santoro publishes his first book, a biography of a Jewish family friend who fled Germany for Colombia shortly before World War Two, it never occurs to him that his father will write a devastating review in a national newspaper. Why does he attack him so viciously? Do the pages of his book unwittingly hide some dangerous secret? As Gabriel sets out to discover what lies behind his father’s anger, he finds himself undertaking an examination of the guilt and complicity at the heart of Colombian society, as one treacherous act perpetrated in those dark days returns with a vengeance half a century later.
For anyone who has read the entire works of Gabriel García Márquez and is in search of a new Colombian novelist, then Juan Gabriel Vásquez's
The Informers
is a thrilling new discovery’ Colm Tóibín,
Guardian
‘Juan Gabriel Vásquez is one of the most original new voices of Latin American literature’ Mario Vargas Llosa
‘A fine and frightening study of how the past preys upon the present’
John Banville
The Secret History of Costaguana
‘With wonderful panache, Vásquez has reinvented Conrad and his literary geography ... A vivid, forceful, masterly book’ Alberto Manguel,
Guardian
London, 1903. Joseph Conrad is struggling with his new novel set in the South American Republic he calls ‘Costaguana’. José Altamirano, Colombian by birth, has just arrived in London, and comes to the writer’s aid by telling him his life story. When
Nostromo
is published the following year, however, José is outraged: his story is nowhere to be found. But the reader is about to discover the true story.
The Secret History of Costaguana
is a comic, tragic, despairing, but above all exhilarating novel, told by a bumptious narrator with a score to settle. It is Latin America’s lively riposte to Europe’s limiting vision of the continent and confirms Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s reputation as one of the leading novelists of his generation.
‘Splendid’
Daily Telegraph
‘Highly layered and intelligent … the most erudite and inventive Colombian novelist writing today’
Independent
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First published in Great Britain 2012
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Originally published in Spain 2011 by Alfaguara
(Santillana Ediciones Generales) as
El ruido de las cosas al caer
Copyright © 2011 by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
English translation copyright © 2012 by Anne McLean
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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ISBN: 978 1 4088 3412 1
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