Haunted by the Coca Leaf in ‘The Sound of Things Falling’
A new novel about Colombia under the reign of cocaine brings Susan Straight back to the late ’80s and early ’90s when crack ruled the California streets. She salutes Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Sound of Things Falling.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, certain parts of life in my Southern California community were dominated by crack cocaine. It wasn’t just that we mourned those who wandered the streets with vacant eyes and hair tangled like sea coral, or mourned ourselves for having to bring our bicycles...
