FOR many Latin American writers, how to write after Gabriel García Márquez is a serious question. The Nobel laureate, best known for his masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” has long been considered a representative of the magical realism movement in Latin America literature and one of the most significant authors of the 20th century.

However, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, a writer and translator from Colombia, brushes the idea aside and says he finds Garcia Marquez weird.

“The method he used is absolutely of no use to me as a writer. Novels such as Dostoyevsky’s ‘Demons’ and Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ are more important to me in building my words than reading ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’,” said Vásquez during a recent interview with Shanghai Daily.

The 42-year-old writer was in Shanghai on a book tour with his 2014 International Dublin Literary award winner and national bestseller “The Sound of Things Falling,” first published in Spanish in 2011. He describes his work as a reaction against magical realism, saying that in his novels there is “disproportionate reality … that which is disproportionate in it is the violence and cruelty of our history.”

“The stories I want to tell had a lot to do with what it was like to grow up in a city of 8 million people out into the 21st century, not a small Caribbean town with a few couples of people at the beginning of the 20th century as García Marquez lived,” Vásquez said.

“The Sound of Things Falling” takes place in and around Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, in the 1980s and 90s. The story centers on Antonio Yammara, a young Bogotá lawyer, and his quest to learn more about his dead friend Ricardo Laverde, an ex-convict who had once been a pilot in the drug trade. In the process, Antonio is forced to confront the impact of violence on his own life.

It’s a novel about fathers and daughters and husbands and wives, and how fear and violence shape their lives.

“One of the things my book is trying to do is to find out what makes my country what it is and what make people in my country what they are,” Vásquez said. “The story can still be envisioned in a country that has changed due to the violence at that time. We are still trying to make sense of what happened 30 years ago.”

Born in 1973, Juan Gabriel Vasquez studied law in his native city, at the Univversity of Rosario in Bogotá. After graduating left for France, where he lived in Paris from 1996 to 1999 “to become a novelist,” he was quoted as saying by a series of papers.

Vásquez is the author of two other novels: “The Informants” and “The Secret History of Costaguana,” both of which have been translated into English. The Chinese version of “The Sound of Things Falling” will be released in October next year.

Q: How did the book “The Sound of Things Falling” came into being?

When I began writing, I wanted to tell the story of this pilot who had worked for the newly born drug trade at the beginning of the 1970s. ... Then one day I opened a magazine and I saw the photograph of the dead hippo, and the effect was amazing. All of a sudden I was remembering my visit to the zoo, and beginning there, the years of narco-terrorist violence. Everything came back to me, down to Pablo Escobar’s death. I realized that my novel should not be about this Colombia guy living in the US, but about my generation of people who are still trying to make sense of all the other stuff that was happening during those years. ... Finding the truth about why this man was killed will eventually give some clues about his life in a country where I was born. That’s the second time I started writing the book again. And it came out good.

Q: What’s the message of the book?

The book touches upon something that I haven’t seen in Colombian literature, which is to tell the intimate, private, emotional side of what it was like to live in Bogotá during that time when you had no direct connection with the narco trafficking or violence. ... I think it is an important subject. The drug war that once captured Colombian citizens shaped the way we live nowadays. We have to be understood why Colombian history is marked by episodes of violence. People read the book because they want a place to go to where they could think about the private side that is not in history books or doesn’t exist in journalism.

Q: Twenty years since the end of Pablo Escobar’s rule of the Colombian drug trade in 1993, do you feel that perhaps Colombia has changed for the better after all?

Of course, it has dramatically changed. It doesn’t mean it is better. It is better in certain evident ways. For instance, we don’t live with terrorism anymore; we don’t live in violence in the cities or in the streets. But commercial drugs are still a source of terrible problems in Colombia, they’re a source of immense wealth and power in the hands of the mafias. The money comes from drug dealing finances of the FARC guerrillas, but also the National Liberation Army forces. This fighting between illegal armies for the control of the lands where drugs are produced has created in Colombia more displacements than any other country in the world except maybe Syria right now. People still have to run away from the country, from their houses, leave everything behind, lose what they already have because there is a war going on there.

Q: “Magical realism” is a typical genre of Latin American fiction that has influenced the world literature as well as many Chinese writers. How do you look at it?

I think the method we call “magical realism” was great 40 years ago, because it did what all great literature does in that it allows us to look into part of reality that we hadn’t seen before.

Nobody had written about that reality, where history and superstition, legends and facts live together in the same universe as in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” But the great discovery soon became overused. It has been transformed by its imitators into an exotic, cheap way of looking at Latin America reality. It simplifies Latin America reality. Part of the role of literature is going against clichés, against simplification, against common place.

I have grown really fascinated by the fact that “magical realism” has had such a big influence on the Chinese literature. The Chinese Nobel Laureate Mo Yan has often spoken that he wouldn’t have become a novelist if he hadn’t read “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Why did this invention of writing of Garcia Marquez speak so closely and strongly to readers and writers from such a different culture? How a literary work written by a Colombian guy from a small town with a few thousands of people was able to talk about the reality of the world? This notion has captured my imagination during my trip to China.