Lives are often interwoven in Juan Gabriel V�squez's 'The Sound of Things Falling'

The new novel from acclaimed Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez is many things - a mystery, a history, a love story - but primarily it is a meditation on who or what is responsible for shaping our lives. The answer, Vásquez proposes, has little to do with autonomy:

“No one who lives long enough can be surprised to find their biography has been molded by distant events, by other people's wills, with little or no participation from our own decisions ... nevertheless, it's always somewhat dreadful when someone reveals to us the chain that has turned us into what we are, it's always disconcerting to discover … the slight or complete lack of control we have over our own experience.”

It's fitting, then, that “The Sound of Things Falling” (Penguin Group, 288 pages, $27.95) explores the life of main character Ricardo Laverde not from his own perspective but from the perspective of “the chain” responsible for who he becomes: his daughter, wife and his friend. The novel opens in 1995 in Bogotá, Colombia, when Antonio Yammara, a 26-year-old law professor, befriends Laverde at a billiards club. Through Yammara's perspective, we learn that there was “a deep discrepancy between (Laverde's) diction and his manners, which were never less than elegant, and his disheveled appearance ... this man has not always been this man. This man used to be another man.”

The men become closer and years after their final encounter Yammara is contacted by Laverde's family, who are searching for information about their father's final days. Here Vásquez seamlessly shifts the point of view to Laverde's wife, detailing her courtship with Laverde in the 1960s, then to his daughter, exploring memories of her father in the 1980s. In doing so, readers are granted a holistic perspective of Laverde's past and the turbulent history of the country of Colombia, including the bedraggled jewel that is its capital city.

Majestic and suspenseful, “The Sound of Things Falling” shows that our lives are transformed by other people, geographies, and histories, making us connected - and whole - in ways we never imagined.