"The Sound of Things Falling" in the Map
BY: Emma Jones
The novel The Sound of Things Falling explores violence and the origins of the drug trade in Colombia. Written by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, this fictional novel follows the protagonist, a young lawyer named Antonio Yammara, as he remembers the death of his friend. To make sense of the violence that has impacted his life, Yammara relies on artifacts of memory, including letters and a cassette tape, his personal recollections, and conversation with others. The novel places the story of Yammara in the context of Bogotá and Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s, making regular reference to historically important locations and events. “The Sound of Things Falling” is an example of how personal and cultural memories can intersect in a narrative centered around violence and the armed conflict in Colombia.
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The Sound of Things Falling makes regular reference to specific places and locations, not only in Bogotá but nationally and internationally. When plotted on a map, it becomes clear that this novel is not focused on Colombia in isolation. Cities connected with the drug trade in the United States, as well as locations across North America and Europe where exiled Colombians have gone, feature in the narrative in addition to locations in Colombia.
In this visualization, each location mentioned in the novel is marked on the map. The pins are color-coded by the average sense of violence associated with that location, with yellow being nonviolent and red being very violent. Looking at this visualization, it is apparent that despite this novel’s focus on violence, the vast majority of locations are associated with peace. It also becomes clear that the violence is not exclusive to Colombia, as some cities in the United States are associated with extreme violence. This visualization helps illustrate the theme in this novel that Colombian armed conflict is not confined to the country, but instead is impacted by and impacts the rest of the world.
The emphasis on location in The Sound of Things Falling is also related to the themes of history and memory. References to location in the novel are either personal, when a character is either in a place or remembering being in a place, historical, when referring to the location of a historic event, or imagined, when a character imagines a place. The relationship between these three ways of referencing a location and the locations themselves are visualized below, with only the locations mentioned two or more times in the novel pictured. The size of the points corresponds with the number of times a location is mentioned. This visualization illustrates the many instances of a place being both personal and imagined. It also highlights the most important locations in the novel, as Bogotá, San Jose Hospital, Hacienda Nápoles, and the billiards club on 14th Street are the only four locations that are referenced in all three contexts.