A novel in need of an ending: The Sound of Things Falling

Obviously Latin American novelists are reared in a tradition of complex narratives with sometimes jolting shifts of point of view, narrative voice, and mode, all encompassing a wide time span that can stretch for generations. Juan Gabriel Vasquez is no doubt part of this tradition, or the 2nd wave of this tradition, and he even gives a little obeisance at one point to the founder, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in his novel The Sound of Things Falling. The stronger sections of this novel make it obvious that Vasquez is a talented writer who can deftly establish a scene and a mood; some of his passages about life in Bogota during a time of drug-infused street violence are very beautiful and evocative. Unfortunately, for me the many disparate elements in this ambitious novel do not cohere into a whole - the novel feels disjointed and sprawling rather than rich and multifarious. I won't belabor with examples, but let's just note that, after a very strong beginning full of questions and mysteries - who shot Ricardo and why? did the shooter also mean to shoot the narrator, Antonio, or was he just a random victim? what's the connection between Ricardo's death and the death of his wife in a plane crash? why has Ricardo been estranged from his wife for 20+ years? - the novel diverges into a very long third-person section, allegedly the account Antonio puts together about the life of Ricardo's wife, Elaine, and it's pretty obvious that Antonio could not have "learned" all these details, that what we're reading is a novel within a novel - which all would be OK is this novel-within did answer the questions that have nagged at us from the outset of Things Falling, but sadly it doesn't do so. By the end, Ricardo's life still makes no sense - the estranged and wizened character we meet at the outset bears no resemblance to the passionate and self-confident man he was in his youth - yes, prison may have, must have, changed him, but we get no sense of that, we have no idea why he has had no contact for all these years w/ Elaine, and most of all the deaths of Ricardo and Elaine are, at the end, both unexplained and unconnected. Vasquez's writerly gifts may for him prove to be a blessing and burden - he brings us into his work so effectively, that the stakes are higher than ordinary. I was totally engaged, and then somewhat let down. I think he owes us more of a sense of an ending.