Vasquez’s The Sound of Things Falling

What is The Sound of Things Falling?

The Sound of Things Falling is the story of a common past, a novel of place, of individual and collective trauma. Told in the first person, the narrator, a professor in contemporary Bogota, looks back to when he was accidentally shot in 1996, when a friend was gunned down and killed while standing next to him. Suffering from post-traumatic stress, Antonio leaves on a journey to unveil his friend’s history, and he discovers his own, as well as painful truths about his nation. The primary story spans a period from the early ’70s to the mid ’90s and deals with Pablo Escobar’s Columbia and the war his cartel and the government waged not just upon each other, but upon its citizens.

What is the sound of things falling? Here, it is quite beautiful: “In a matter of minutes the musical scandal of crickets and cicadas burst out and a few minutes later had calmed down again, and only a few soloists chimed up here and there, interrupted every once in a while by the croak of a lost frog. The bats fluttered three meters above our heads, coming in and out of their refuges in the wooden roof, and the yellow light moved with the puffs of a gentle breeze, and the air was warm and the rum was going down nicely.”

Adding to this beauty is that the novel is translated into English from its original Spanish by Anne McLeod. Translation is its own much under-appreciated art form. To capture the essence of meaning, to capture the feeling, the ideas, the musicality of the original text, especially from a more lyrical native language–this cannot be an easy task, and must be a labor of love. It is poetry in its own right. McLeod, the translator, has indeed won major prizes for her translations. And the author of The Sound of Things Falling, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, is also an accomplished translator of major works, while his original fiction has won numerous awards from the Alfaguara Novel Prize in Spain to an English PEN award.

The language in evocative. The story is interesting.  It creates feeling and tone: melancholy and quiet and sadness. Add to this its ideas about what matters–about collective experience and how we treat each other and those in our care–and the result is an artful novel full of resonance.

The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, 270 pages, Riverhead Books 2013

Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart

Winner of the Guardian First Book Prize and the Irish Book Awards Winner Book of the Year, it’s assured that The Spinning Heart is a good book. It’s easy to compare it to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, because each chapter is told from a different person’s point of view. Yet how these chapters–and pitch-perfect voices–fit together to provide a traditional novel’s arc, as well as the broader story of contemporary Ireland after the death of the Celtic Tiger is where the novel truly shines.

When the construction boom goes bust, a small town flounders in its present and revisits ghosts of Ireland’s economic past. Bobby, the foreman of the local construction company, is revered by the town and is this book’s protagonist. Yet we only hear his voice once–a superb narrative trick. Yet will the hero kill his father? Is he having an affair? Has he cracked up? And who kidnapped a child from the local daycare center? These are the plot lines, but the reader arrives at them bit by bit, through each different character’s voice. For example, there is Realtin, the young single mother who shows us a broader economic story of Ireland, and how though things change, they still stay the same: “There are forty-four houses in this estate. I live in number twenty-three. There’s an old lady living in number forty. There’s no one living in any of the other houses, just the ghosts of people who never existed. I’m stranded, she’s abandoned.”

One of my favorite things about much of contemporary Irish literature is that stylistically the language and descriptions tend to be as lyrical, fierce, and flowing as the sea. You won’t get as much of the lyricism here. It is still here, however: “I’ll stand there until I start feeling like a dick, then I’ll get the bus back to the village and look at her number in my phone while the summer rain runs down the window and my cowardly heart settles back into the slow rhythm of time being wasted.”

You’ll also get sad, and almost funny, realism: “I was diagnosed with post-traumatic shock, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, manic depression, scoliosis, psoriasis, addictive personality and a few more things. I learnt them ones off by heart for telling them shitbags inside the welfare office where to stick their fucking job interviews.”

If you want to know about real Ireland and to hear the actual cadences of its people–not the packaged, plastic emerald sold to tourists that relies on nostalgia and nonsense, this is a book to read: true, fierce, tragic, and funny. At just 156 pages, it does much with a superb economy of language. Too many recently published American books suffer from bloat, perhaps a symptom of our American culture. And there are parallels to America here as well; this is also a book to read to see the stunning similarities, regardless of location, that capitalism creates, after the fall.

Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things

In my never-ending and often over-zealous quest to de-clutter and organize our house, I tossed out the issue of Poets & Writers that featured an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert. This is not a reflection on either P&W or on Gilbert.  I remember being inspired by the P&W interview, and even sending an email to writer friends that contained some quotes from Gilbert. That said, I’m not big on inspirational quotes. But Gilbert is inspiring. I’d even give you some of those inspirational quotes if I hadn’t thrown them out. Sorry. So let me instead say that Gilbert’s story is inspiring, too–both the literal story of Eat, Pray, Love itself and the bigger story of its sales, its following, the backlash against it, and how, as a writer, you could possibly face the expectation (both internal and external) that inevitably exists after having one of the biggest best-sellers of all time.  Granted, most writers would love to have this problem. Most writers too revisit similar themes in everything they write, in different form and story. And The Signature of All Things, Gilbert’s new novel, does revisit some of the central ideas of Eat, Pray, Love, with a different, fictional approach–and in another century.  How does one reconcile science and the divine? Why is there such suffering in the world? What is faith? Why is it that women don’t demand more from their lives and from those in their lives?

Would The Signature of All Things be in print if Gilbert wasn’t Gilbert? Maybe. Would the story of a female bryologist–one who studies moss–set in the 1800s catch the attention of the publishing world today? Unlikely. Can you read The Signature of All Things without what I’ll call the Gilbert Question? Probably not. So, should you invest 499 pages of reading time?

If you enjoy a charming, light voice, if you want to read a story about a female scientist who is truly curious about the world, if you are interested in the history of biology and Darwin, or if want to read a big novel from which questions about women’s lives can be asked, the answer is: Sure.

For me, reading is about knowledge and not so much about fact, for facts don’t always add up to knowledge. For me, a good book is not its research (though this novel is surely well researched), but it is about the sum total and effect of that research. For me, a good book is mostly about understanding people–and perhaps this is where Gilbert most excels.

From page 320 of the novel, “She thought she knew much, but she knew nothing. She knew nothing about her sister. She knew nothing about sacrifice. She knew nothing about the man she had married. She knew nothing about the invisible forces that had dictated her life.”

I enjoyed watching this character learn. I enjoyed watching a celebrated writer tell a whole story skillfully. That said, we are talking about 499 pages of reading time and more than a century of novel time. This book covers a whole life. Parts of the book are undeniably boring. Parts of the book are undeniably entertaining. Parts of the book are undeniably smart. Parts of the book, eh. But, on the whole, the fact that all of these elements are present are what add up to Gilbert’s popular and democratic style. The Gilbert Question answered.

The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan

J. Courtney Sullivan’s 377-page novel published in 2013 should be a hit with readers who like well researched fiction and who have an interest in how diamonds came to symbolize marriage and love. Sullivan gives us a series of characters who live in the late 1940s to the present, and she paints portraits of several very different marriages, as well as a character who chooses to be married to her career.

The story of the real-life Mary Frances Gerety, fictionalized in The Engagements, does glitter with interesting facets. Gerety is  responsible for creating the tagline A Diamond Is Forever, and the story of Gerety certainly makes for rich mining.

Ok, I’ll stop with the diamond puns now and give you the bottom line: I enjoyed Sullivan’s earlier novel Maine (link), but this one didn’t have the same resonance for me. Although the history of diamond marketing is interesting–and important–I didn’t find a lot of new information here, and too much of it came across as research, not as research in service to the story.

I’ve written previously about how Barbara Kingsolver handles research so that it is absolutely integral to the story in her novel Flight Behavior (link), while not coming across as pedantic. Too much felt pedantic in The Engagements for me to love it, and not enough of the real blood history of diamonds was included for me to get behind the concept completely. But how the advertizing industry created a symbol of love from a rock in the ground is worth the read.

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett’s new collection of essays is the kind of book that makes a great gift. Like its title, it is a happy book. It made me laugh out loud, it made me shed tears, and it made me share a lot of quotations with writer friends, with my aunt who is a poor Clare nun, with my boyfriend, and I even shared some with Facebook. If you love writing, dogs, your dad, opera, RVs, independent book stores, nuns, marriage, or just enjoy witty essays: This is a great book. It is deeply personal, vivid, funny, charming, and wise.

Patchett’s essay on writing, The Getaway Car, contained some of the best advice on writing that I’ve ever read—and I have read a lot. A whole lot. “People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say.”

In My Road to Hell Was Paved, Patchett details her journey in an RV with her on-again, off-again boyfriend. They were off-again during the journey, on which they learned “the Great RV Truths”—and they learned about love: “I feel like I went out to report on the evils of crack and have come back with a butane torch and a pipe. I went undercover to expose a cult and have returned in saffron robes with my head shaved. I have fallen in love with my recreational vehicle. And I have fallen in love with Karl…”

While on the topic of love, don’t even the happily married wonder sometimes what is the magic, the mystery, the thing that keeps it all together? Here, according to Patchett, is a useful question to ask: “Does he make you a better person?”

And reading this collection of essays might just make you a better person too, at least while you share Patchett’s lovely world.

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The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

If ever a 771-page novel could be a two-hour thriller, this is the book. Of course, it will likely take you a lot longer than two hours to read it, but it will feel like only two hours. And if ever such a thing existed as a literary thriller, this is the book.

The Goldfinch has it all: From high society Manhattan to tawdry Vegas, from the elite art world to dirty drug dens, from lost children to the kind people who save them, this book promises to entertain, with some beautiful, ugly, and wise meditations on life, love, and art.

When several bombs explode inside a New York art museum, killing 13-year-old Theo Decker’s mother, he survives, but he survives in a world in which he is very much alone–and in possession of one of history’s greatest and rarest paintings by a Dutch master. Tartt goes on to create a hard, miraculous, mysterious, and dangerous life for Theo, told with the same specific detail, extraordinary shades of light and dark, and grand scope that the Dutch masters created on canvas.

If there are only variations on two primary stories in the world—that a stranger comes to town or a man goes on a journey—this novel sets Theo off on both. He engages with obstacle after obstacle along the way. He experiences privilege and poverty, comfort and deprivation. Told in the first person, the reader experiences each as Theo does. The world is fascinating and exotic, but completely recognizable. Tartt makes the reader’s heart beat as Theo faces danger and makes idiotic decisions. In addition to working as a great technical feat to put the reader in Theo’s shoes, great purpose of ideas also exist in the book’s narration.

For example:

“A great  sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are. Because—isn’t it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture–? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it’s a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, ever Disney princess knows the answer: ‘Be yourself.’ ‘Follow your heart.’ Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted?”

Like the first-person narration itself, no one idea can be trusted. Indeed, perhaps that’s where art, literature, and a multitude of perspectives come in, and it is in this masterly third novel of Tartt’s that she conveys this. She also plumbs themes about post-traumatic stress, alcoholism and addiction, and the value of work.

The book deserves to be a best seller or cool film. In fact, the LA Times reported today that the same team who made The Hunger Games series into films has signed on.

Tartt graduated from Bennington College in 1982, a contemporary of Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Lethem, and she certainly has the chops of a contemporary master. A novel well suited for a long plane ride, quiet evenings in front of the fire, or anytime you can steal away for a few minutes to read: The Goldfinch is worth it.

Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen

Once in awhile, happily-ever-afters arrive. Once in awhile, the right people meet the right people. Once in awhile, joy comes to stay. Anna Quindlen’s writing reminds us of this.

The New York Times Pulitzer-winning columnist and best selling author of seven novels has one of the most charming voices in fiction today. Her new novel Still Life with Bread Crumbs is, quite simply, lovely.  Once you pick it up, you may not want to put it down.

Still Life tells the story of once-famous photographer Rebecca Winter. Rebecca has reached an age where she is overlooked, her bank account is drained, she can’t get any traction on her work, her philandering husband left long ago, and she can no longer afford her Upper West Side apartment and life. She exists as a still-life rendering of her past, yet each of these tribulations is a bread crumb that leads her to a rental house in the woods of upstate New York. What unveils is a realist fairy tale, as Quindlen shows us the pain and darkness in her characters’ lives, with levity and fun, which is a rare treat.

Told with her intelligence, care, and singular wit, Quindlen provides the reader with a trail that explores aging, feminism, the relevance of art and the creative process, pretension, mental illness, and the day-to-day struggles and triumphs of life in the big city and a small town.

At the end of the trail, Quindlen gives her readers a true gift of story telling; in Still Life with Bread Crumbs, she lets her readers feel what it is to find happiness and to be, quite simply, happy.

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri’s 1999 publication The Interpreter of Maladies is one of my favorite short story collections. The characters are vivid, the settings are interesting, and the stories are moving. Lahiri is a smart, talented, skilled writer, who won the Pulitzer for Interpreter and has received many accolades for her publications since. So, I expected to enjoy her new novel The Lowland.

The plot: two inseparable brothers, the dutiful Subhash and the adventurous Udayan, are separated. Subhash travels to America for graduate school and  Udayan stays home in Calcutta, becoming increasingly involved with the Naxalite movement, which believed in “revolutionary violence that opposed oppression. That it was a force of liberation, humane.” Tragedy ensues, yet we as readers do not experience the movement or Udayan’s roles in until the end of the book. Instead, the book focuses on Subhash, who picks up the pieces.

Overall, the novel is well considered and composed, and the characters, setting, and plot have the potential to be riveting, but I wasn’t riveted throughout.

The prose is Hemingway-eque in its leanness and staccato-like rhythms, but it lacks Hemingway’s affect. Instead, the writing felt oddly flat. Consistent with a Hemingway-like style, there is little interiority, and we view emotion through spare action. While Hemingway builds tension through perspective, snappy dialogue, brilliant symbolism, and setting, here the limited omniscient perspective and style have the effect of keeping the reader at a distance.

In Hemingway, the perspective is so close that the reader is a participant, involved bodily as she sits in the heat cleaved with the characters in “a station that lies between two rails in the sun.” In The Lowland, however, I felt like a viewer only: “As part of their life-science lesson they drew pictures of mangrove trees.”

Part of the distance may also stem from the handling of time. The book spans the lifetime of several characters, which is a lot of material, and at times I was utterly drawn in and moved by key scenes and turning points, but on the whole, much felt glossed.

The novel opens in Calcutta.  I usually love to read books with settings that are exotic to me, but I didn’t get a lot from this. From there, the book moves to Rhode Island. Given that I’m from little Rhody, and Lahiri too was raised there, I expected to see the place jump off the page or pull me into it. But neither the characters nor the setting did this for me.

Despite its political backdrop, the book is really a family saga, which is often one of my favorite subgenres. However, there needs to be a significant emotional nexus between reader and characters for family sagas to work, and I just couldn’t get the vibe. That said, I still respect this work and find much to admire in it. The prose is straight-forward and unsentimental, and each character and the plot line resolve in a satisfying manner.

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

“How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.”

What woman isn’t pissed off? This is one of the questions that opens the book, and Messud does a good job illustrating some of the reasons why every woman should be furious sometimes. Yet this novel isn’t every woman’s story, nor is it an angry diatribe.

It is one woman’s story. The Woman Upstairs is 42-year-old Nora Eldridge, elementary school teacher, quintessential “good girl”, frustrated want-to-be artist, and desperately lonesome woman. The story is told specifically, precisely, and intelligently, and it explores big thematic questions that every person should think about: What is love? What is art? What is sexuality? What happens to a life when one’s dreams don’t come true? And why should it take anger to trigger those dreams?

Set in a small town just north of Boston, one day Nora drops a bag of apples in Whole Foods. The next day she begins to fall in love–with an entire family. The forbidden fruit looms large.

Nora tells the story in the first-person, and she doles out the details of this pivotal school year, when she becomes intimately involved with Skandar, famous Lebanese historian and academic father; Sirena, soon-to-be-famous artist and mother; and Reza, their beautiful, charming child. Much of the novel involves Nora sorting out her emotions and interacting with these three characters, and the overarching question that the first-person narration creates is: “Why is this woman so angry?” Because many of the events and much of the year is mundane, it’s a testament to the author’s skill that the overarching question propels the read to the very end. The question acts as a kind of mystery, because although anyone can relate to Nora, at times the reader has to question her emotional wisdom, right up to the very last line of the book. Yet through each character that Nora’s sad and hungry eyes see, Messud guides us to explore the perils and triumphs of love, life, and art.

“Sirena wasn’t like me, constrained by reality, by what actually was or had been. She took on storybook worlds, plundering other peoples’ imaginations but not their histories. Maybe it was what made her, what makes her—a real artist in the eyes of the world, whereas I count as a spinster with a hobby…Sirena, on the other hand, is engaged with the life force. We all want that, really. It’s what attracts us: someone who opens doors to possibility, to the barely imagined. Someone who embraces the colors and textures, the tastes and transformations—someone who embraces, period.”

Above all, this is a story that embraces and that can be embraced. It is a novel that is art, written by a “real artist”, and it may just make you think, question, and imagine, even after you close the book.

Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy

Reading an acclaimed, established author’s early works is usually an interesting and informative process. From a writer’s perspective, it’s helpful to see how other writers develop their skill. Reading a writer’s first novels through the lens of their later books also helps to illuminate the issues at the core of their work; it shows what makes them tick.

That said, I really didn’t enjoy reading O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy. O’Brien is an Irish-born writer who now lives in London, and these books were important when they were published in the early 1960s. In fact, the books caused an uproar at the time, were banned, and even burned. In many ways, their protagonist is a stand-in for the changes that Ireland itself underwent as a country: The provincial, rural, and religious becomes sophisticated, urban, and secular. What’s more: O’Brien wrote about the feelings of women, the tedium of their lives, their desires and disappointments, and she wrote frankly about sex in a way that hadn’t yet been done.

But, ugh.

The two main characters, Caithleen and Baba, are friends from childhood through marriage and into adulthood beyond. They are women that you can identify with and at the same time would like to shake, even as they themselves recognize — and are impatient with — their own shortcomings and the shortcomings of everyone around them.

The work is hyper-realist, and it reads like autobiography (and the first book, The Country Girl, is memoir). In the last book, where there are interesting shifts in narration and perspective, you can begin to see O’Brien’s skill and technique developing. There is humor — much humor — within the pages, and there is also the lovely story of enduring friendship. However, the friendship plays the supporting role in the story, as it does in the characters’ lives, rather than taking center stage.

On center stage is the relentless dependency on men that perhaps was characteristic and telling of the culture and era in which these books were written; nonetheless, it got on my nerves. Nor do I buy that this is a universal female story. We all know timeless examples of strong, resilient, independent women. (And there are many books that tell their stories, though the fact that none spring to mind is worrisome and should be the topic of another essay. Examples? Someone, anyone, quick!)

Here, we have Caithleen aka Kate, the protagonist, presented as a smart and clever girl who won a scholarship, yet she throws her life away completely for one smarmy man after another. And perhaps the reason why the story irritated me so much is because, despite all the social changes and progress we have made culturally in the west, this is a true story that endures too often.

“Is he outside?” I asked…

“Where is he?” I asked.

She looked at me squarely for a second and then said, “He’s gone home.”

“Without me?” I was shocked. “Isn’t he coming for me?”

“No,” she said, sighing, “he’s not coming for you.”

So, if 530 pages of women making bad choices is your thing: read the trilogy. My recommendation, however, is stick to O’Brien’s later works such as The Light of Evening, which is a beautiful meditation on mothers and daughters, or Wild Decembers, which looks at unfair gender relations among siblings and women’s rights—and the lack thereof—in a way that is lovely and wise, rather than cloying and fraught.