Book Review: 'The Sound of Things Falling' by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

’Sometimes I think,’ he told me the only time we talked somewhat seriously, ‘I’ve never looked anyone in the eye.’

And the man speaking here, Ricardo Laverde, never looks you, the reader, in the eye either. Even at the end. Perhaps, even then, when you have heard the whole story, then, you realise just how much you haven’t learned about him. It’s an unmystery.

 But he is a pilot.

   

 This is a book translated from Spanish to English written by a man who is a translator of literature from French to Spanish. And ‘translation’ could certainly be considered an identifiable theme here. Not just from a language to a language, but any kind of translation of experience in the form of language into a story.

’He must’ve done something.’

But what did he do? And that’s the story of the story. I enjoyed its slow unveiling through the range of different story-telling frames Vásquez plays with. And he plays with the reader like maybe only Spanish writers do. There are some turns of phrase which come off as a little naive and twee in English, but there's this very recognisable way modern Spanish reads (In English that is ... which is all I know). Marquez looms over them all, since Cervantes seems completely different. But there's always this magic-realist lilt to it, and the way repetition is used like it's verse.

’No, wait,’ I tried to say, but it was too late, she’d got rid of the phone and left me in Aura’s hands, my voice in Aura’s hands, and my nostalgia hanging in the warm air: the nostalgia for things that weren’t yet lost.

People reading the blurb of my edition might be disappointed in the story; the ’literary-noir’ call is a bit off: more literary than noir. But that’s not Vásquez’s fault. The action is chiefly internal, but it certainly kept me ‘at it’. Sometimes there is a sense of disappointment ... but Vásquez manages to maintain this interesting sense of background foreboding and oppressive weight, the reading equivalent of living in Colombia during the Escobar years, an era that looms over the story as a whole, and, an entire generation of Colombians: our protagonist, Antonio Yammara, among them. And this kind of disappointment and exhaustion seems to be an important sense to develop. There is a generational shared experience through Escobar and his ‘stories’ (which were once all-to-visceral in nature, of course) and, especially, his place of residence.

 

And sometimes she asked him, ‘Do you like planes?’

Flying is an important trope in the book, as a means of legend-building, bravado, escape, living, dying and trafficking. Certainly, as an essentially destructive means of connection to the gringos it becomes self-evident. It allows one to reach out to the other, and the other to reach back: the big planes coming in, the little planes returning...

’And you, Señorita Fritts, do you know when you are going to die? I can tell you?’

And we do, of course. Death in the story is always invested with heavy dramatic irony. We know where these people are headed. We get to hear the black box recording first, then we work backwards. And that’s where the moral ground gets murky, in the sense of agency and outcome, and the smaller people caught up in larger things for a range of different reasons. Vásquez handles these things with great style and a languid sense of character ... if, at times, a little unsubtly. His impressions of his homeland and home-city are fascinating literary travelogues easily worth the price of the fare alone...

Then I realised no one wants to hear heroic stories, but everyone likes to be told about someone else’s misery.

Book Review: 'Stoner' by John Williams

When it comes to titles of books that have not aged well, this one has to be up there with Nietzsche’s 'The Gay Science'. When it was suggested to me by a goodreads friend, I thought that he must’ve found out about my thing for ‘The Big Lebowski’...

But it turns out to be the surname of the protagonist, one William Stoner, who shares attributes with the author of the book, John Williams, e.g. insofar as being a long-term academic in an American Department of English ... so much so that there is a much more strident than normal warning-cum-dedication from the author to his former colleagues at the University of Missouri to the tune of ‘this is fictional, and I’m not taking the piss out of any of you...’ It is a book that is easy to read and strangely affecting. I cried at the end. But what these tears were for is hard to say. And I find myself thinking about Stoner at odd times of the day. Was it because of people I have known? My own (albeit even less grand) experience as a doctoral student in what passes for an English department at the turn of the millennium in Australia? Just the purity of the prose and its vision? Maybe all these things and more. It’s certainly a kind of porn-for-literati what Williams throws on the page: literature about loving literature and cherishing it and valuing it, and its learning.

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it was illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

And, in the end, the book is about Meaning ... which is kind of weak to say, since I suppose everything is, in the end, but it’s appropriate, since it touches on the idea of Meaning-making. Two world wars go on in the background of Stoner’s life, and much Meaning was being made there, but Williams explores the extraordinary in the ordinary, and even a kind of ordinary that is often decked in failure and disappointment.

...in the long run, all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness that did not alter.

In the shorter term, there was recourse to learning, and there was literature for that, something that:

...changed the world which was its subject, and changed it because of its dependence on it.

There’s no classic victory for Stoner, not in career, marriage, love, family ... nothing. His efforts were futile. The results, empty. And he diminishes into nothingness. The end.

   

But, of course, the book is also curiously uplifting, in just the right sort of ordinary ways. There is a presence in being a presence, and there is the joy of being alive, knowing you are alive, proclaiming it through all the different ways you are capable—through lust, through learning—that you: are.

He was himself, and he knew what he had been.

The intensity of his practical involvement with language and learning, his passion and spirit for it, and then the tension of trying to communicate this to others, through words—‘...knowing something through words that could not be put in words...’—is foremost throughout his life, and the agony of coming to terms with our imperfect faculties to do this. His inadequacy is all of our inadequacies. I mean, just writing this simple review and trying to imbue it with what I want it to have in it is just another feeble example. All this hot and living stuff is there, right there, just as for Stoner ... but, then:

What was most alive withered in his words; and what moved him most became cold in the utterance.

Williams wrote this in the mid 60s, and his timing was probably poor. One can’t but help to consider his placement of Stoner back as a freshman in 1910 as some kind of review of the Academy he found himself in after his post WW2 undergraduate years. When Stoner is being leant on to pass a student called Walker who deserves to be failed, he digs his heels in. Departmental politics, professional threats and even the acknowledged futility of the gesture are not enough to persuade him otherwise.

”We can’t keep the Walkers out.”

He’s told. And they can’t. And they don’t.

Walker is a great talker, his rhetoric is fast and full and dripping, and he can skirt around the generalities of literature and English with slimy ease. But he knows nothing about the works themselves. He hasn’t really read anything ... except what has been written ABOUT them. Stoner is shocked that Walker had got to postgraduate level in English without any Greek or Latin or German or French. And they didn’t keep the Walkers out. My English departments are all post-Walker. And I kind of wish I could have had a shot at Stoner’s pre-Walker time. I cruised through, enjoying what I was doing, and getting great results and scholarships, but I was never really pressed. Not like Stoner and his ilk were. Chaucer and Beowulf? Not in translation? What? And how they get Stoner, with a reputation smear claiming he was opposed to Walker because of his physical disability would’ve been even worse today. It might have trended on Twitter, if no lions had been shot that week, and Huff Post could’ve done a feature on disability prejudice. And then his affair with a female student. Facebook would’ve been burning with Jezebel op-eds, and Mamamia could’ve followed on the currency-ebb with a Top Five Things we Hate about Stoner.

   

 Was Williams seeing this develop in the 60s, and pitching the Walker back to the 30s as the worm inside the fruit? Williams is also a beautiful stylist with a deep sensibility. He has the capacity, through Stoner, to bring the humanity and shared human plight out of even the least likable characters, such as Lomax, Walker and Edith (Stoner’s wife). His touches with character and scene are deft and full of meaning. His similes seem to ring like tuning forks.

...the man’s eyes were gray and flat like pieces of glazed crockery.

He is a writer’s writer for a reader’s reader. And his openness and subtlety rescues him from any sense of stuffiness or ‘in’ effect.

   

 It is nice to think that Williams’ work has been rescued. This book sold only 2000 copies and went out of print quickly. And he died in 1985. Stoner’s last living act is to pick up and hold on to his own failed book, and, when he dies, it ‘...fell into the silence of the room.’

 The room remains silent, but Stoner has been picked back up.

 And this is true and good and beautiful.