Under the long shadow of Bolano: Juan Gabriel Vasquez

At start of  new year am reading Juan Gabriel Vasquez's novel The Sound of Things Falling - yet another smart, thoughtful, unconventional novel by a young Latin American (Colombian) author. What a rich literary tradition has emerged (and sustained) from Latin America. Many young writers now are working in the long shadow of Roberto Bolano, and, from first section of Marquez's novel he is definitely one of Bolano's offspring (although his name and his nationality point back a generation farther, to Gabriel Garcia Marquez - though their styles are very different - JGV not drawn at all to magic realism, just to realism with narrative inventions - or so it seems so far). In this novel, set in contemporary Bogota but with a focus on a series of events from the 1990s, the narrator (Antonio, I think) recalls a man and even that completely changed his life - and proceeds to describe the sequence - mid 1990s, he's a young law professor, dating a former student, who becomes pregnant, and they plan to marry or at least raise the daughter (they know from ultrasound) together; he spends evenings in a pool hall where he often shoots pool with a somewhat older man - rumor that he'd just gotten out of prison. They spend a long night drinking, and the friend wants to maybe unload his conscience to narrator, who rebuffs him - though does learn that the guy is waiting for a long-anticipated visit from America from his (former?) wife. On their next meeting, the friend says he needs to find a cassette player to listen to a recording someone made from him; narrator brings him to a literary museum (a real place in Bogota, I learned - the one-time home of a famous, tragic Colombian poet); the guy listens to the tape, tearfully, departs abruptly. Narrator surmises that guy's wife may have died in a crash of an AA plan that week. He tries to catch up w/ his friend on the street and a passing car shoots them both - killing the friend. At this point, we have no idea if this was part of the random Colombian street violence in this dangerous era or a motivated assassination. On a sad note - that AA plane crash, a true event, touched our family, as M. had a professional friend who died, along with husband and children, in that crash.