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Fall is such a versatile word. To fall is to move downward, typically rapidly and freely without control, from a higher to a lower level. But fall with a capital F is a season. Fall is also in the title of bands and books.

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A poem called "My Autumn Leaves" by Bruce Weigl

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A poem called "My Autumn Leaves" by Bruce Weigl

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A poem called "To Autumn" by John Keats about Fall.

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A poem called "To Autumn" by John Keats about Fall.

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A review of the book "The Sound of Things Falling"

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A review of the book "The Sound of Things Falling"

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One particularly striking scene takes place in an abandoned zoo, originally financed by the drug lord Pablo Escobar decades earlier and now going to ruin. At the end of the 1970s, Escobar had bought almost eight square miles in order to build his personal paradise, but after his death in 1993 the animal cages and the fake reconstructions of dinosaurs were left to rust. The kangaroo that kicked a football and the parrot that recited the names of the members of the Colombian national soccer team have long since disappeared, and the garage is full of antique cars (including Al Capone's Pontiac) that are falling apart. Most of the rare animals have died from neglect, though when Antonio and Maya visit the place they encounter a hippo on the loose.

After this bizarre outing, Antonio and Maya sleep together. "I thought how the two of us were alone in this room and in this house," Antonio reflects, "but alone with a shared solitude, each of us alone with our own pain deep in our flesh but mitigating it at the same time by the strange arts of nakedness."

Maya is living in the house her father built for her mother with the first profits of his drug runs. Antonio is drawn to her partly because they both grew up in the tragic '80s in Bogotá, while Antonio's wife had a protected childhood elsewhere. Laverde presumably was killed because he had once again been dabbling in drug-dealing.

Vásquez has constructed his plot very carefully, its past and present elements neatly meshing. We learn, for example, that Laverde's father's face was disfigured after a horrifying plane crash during a patriotic demonstration in the late 1930s, an event that mirrors the death of Laverde's American wife in another crash half a century later.

Every life, Vásquez suggests, is determined by remote causes: "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. Those long processes that end up running into our life - sometimes to give it the shove it needed, sometimes to blow to smithereens our most splendid plans - tend to be hidden like subterranean currents, like tiny shifts of tectonic plates, and when the earthquake finally comes we invoke the words we've learned to calm ourselves, accident, fluke and sometimes fate."

The novel is built on Colombia's tragic history as a country enriched and destroyed by drugs. Vásquez (who has lived in France, Spain, Belgium and the United States) has addressed his homeland's troubled history in previous works. In "The Informers," for example, a young man publishes a book about a Jewish woman who took refuge from Hitler in Colombia - and the author's own father writes a devastatingly negative review in a local newspaper. Much of the action takes place in a Colombian hotel, full of Germans, both Nazis and Jews.

Vásquez dealt with the sins of fathers, Colombia's nefarious past and the cyclical nature of misfortune in that earlier novel as well as in this one. Is it any accident that he has also written a novel, "The Secret History of Costaguana," that reimagines the life of Joseph Conrad, who in turn reimagined Colombia in "Nostromo"? "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary," Conrad wrote in "Under Western Eyes," adding that "men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." It's a conclusion with which Juan Gabriel Vásquez would seem to agree.

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'The Sound of Things Falling,' by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

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One particularly striking scene takes place in an abandoned zoo, originally financed by the drug lord Pablo Escobar decades earlier and now going to ruin. At the end of the 1970s, Escobar had bought almost eight square miles in order to build his personal paradise, but after his death in 1993 the animal cages and the fake reconstructions of dinosaurs were left to rust.

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Fall Out Boy - The Last Of The Real Ones (Official Music Video)