The Sound of Things Falling & The Cellist of Sarajevo

Happy 2014!  I have used my brief winter break to do a bit of reading, and want to recommend two books that I greatly enjoyed reading:  The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez and The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway.

The Sound of Things Falling is the latest novel by Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and it follows the interconnected lives of a professor in Bogotá named Antonio, a pilot who spent years in prison, his gringa Peace Corps wife, and their Colombian-raised beekeeper daughter.  It's a beautifully-written story that takes a convoluted but smooth route through the timelines of individual lives, through remembered and imagined moments, through recordings and letters.  The conclusions drawn from the introspection of these characters raise larger questions about the trauma of an entire country: Colombia in the time of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar's reign.

The Cellist of Sarajevo is also a war story.  It takes place in the besieged city of Sarajevo.  There are four characters that the novel divides its time among: a husband and father man trying to survive the trip to and from a brewery to fetch water for his family; an elderly man on his own errand, also trying to avoid the shells and snipers causing the citizens of the city to drop like flies while crossing streets and bridges; a female sniper given the task of defending a cellist from enemy snipers in Sarajevo; and the cellist himself, a man who plays Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor for 22 days, one for each person killed by a bomb while buying bread at the shop across the street.  Amazingly, this novel is based on a real cellist who played in ruined buildings during the siege, Vedran Smailović.

The themes in these novels have a lot of overlap, and both are driven predominantly by the inner thoughts and drives of their characters.  These books left me with a sense of the fragility and senselessness of human life and the world we inhabit, while also taking great pain to focus on the smallest, silliest coincidences and singular events that define lives and make them unique and cherishable.