The Motorcycle Diaries - Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Che Guevara is, to put it lightly, a polarizing figure. Though his deification on some parts of the left makes me a bit queasy given the repressions he oversaw—and to some extent directly imposed—on Cuba’s citizens, the countervailing vilification he receives from the right has always felt a little forced, as the exigencies of revolution and war seem to them acceptable, even laudable, when done by their side, and repugnant when done by others. Basically, Che is the ultimate optical illusion for political partisans: some see two faces chatting, others see a vase, but the pattern of light and shadow is in both cases identical.

But I’m not here to talk about Che Guevara the revolutionary, but Ernesto Guevara, author of a poignant memoir about his travels around South and Central America. It’s called The Motorcycle Diaries, but the eponymous motorcycle dies less than halfway through the book, and anyway it isn’t even really a motorcycle, but a regular bicycle with a jury-rigged motor attached (though come to think of it, putting a motor on a bicycle does make it a motorcycle in the most literal sense, so point to Che there, I guess).

Published nearly 30 years after his death, The Motorcycle Diaries was obviously released without Che’s knowledge, and it’s unclear to me whether he wrote his diary with the intention that anyone would ever read it. There is indeed no overwhelming impulse to apply narrative structure to the text, with passages recounting experiences episodically and often without the connective tissue of segues. A few of his letters to his parents are interspersed between entries. Yet there is undeniably a literary flourish to the work that suggests he hoped it to be read. I am always reluctant to judge the prose style of works read in translation, but I can at least say that Che utilized a surprising degree of lyricism, irony, and humour, giving depth to his more prosaic observations of life among the lower classes of South America. The humour especially surprised me, particularly its sly self-deprecation. I will remember the anecdote about the peaches for the rest of my life.

Also evident (and here the right wingers will roll their eyes and gag) was an undeniable empathy for the people he met. For nearly everyone he writes about, he does so with compassion and kindness, and there seems to be a sincere sorrow at the plight of the poorer folks he encounters. particularly the patients at one of the several leper colonies he visits. Whether this compassion was a genuine fuel for his revolutionary zeal or merely a pretense for later violence is something I’ll leave to others to debate, because frankly I don’t really care. Che was who he was and did what he did, and regardless of these things his writings show insight and talent.

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon - David Grann

This is the first new read I’ve picked up in a while. I’ve been working my way back through Stephen King’s short story collections and didn’t have much to write about them (they’re good). I put The Lost City of Z on hold a while ago and forgot about it, sp when it came in I only roughly remembered what it was about. Fortunately, my interests are more consistent than my memory, and I usually end up enjoying the things my past self requests for me. So it was here.

The Lost City of Z is a journalistic account of the life of Percy Fawcett, one of the last Great White Explorers, a group seen much less kindly these days, but that loomed large in the British—and by extension, the global—imagination around the turn of the 19th century. Whatever you think of the European inclination to explore uncharted lands—or, indeed, to consider lands where people had lived for ten thousand years “uncharted” in the first place—Fawcett was a remarkable man, possessed of a keen mind, an unparalleled drive, and an almost inhuman constitution (he seemed never to get sick, even when everyone else in his party was half-dead with rot and fever). After several tresk through the Amazon, he became obsessed with the notion of a lost civilization paved in gold, a place commonly called El Dorado, which he referred to as Z. In his quest for Z, Fawcett disappeared along with his son and his son’s friend, his whereabouts and even ultiamte fate unknown.

Parallell to the story of Fawcett’s life and disappearance, the author David Grann details his own efforts to pick up the mystery that had consumed hundreds of others before him. What he finds isn’t something I want to spoil, but the book has an exciting conclusion that suggests Fawcett wasn’t as far off the mark as his detractors claim.

The writing is engaging journalistic prose, unadorned but full of keen detail. I enjoyed reading it.

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I first read this book about ten years ago, and for some reason it didn’t stick. I could only recall one thing about it in detail: a trail of blood winding its way through a rustic Latin American town. Re-reading it now, I’m surprised more of it didn’t stand out for me, as the story is bristling with rich, poetic images.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of a family, but it’s also the story of a town, as the Beundias and Macondo are inextricably linked. From Macondo’s founding by the Beundia patriarch, José Arcadio, to its foretold destruction, the town holds the Beundia family at its turbulent center, and the fate of one feels reflected by the fate of the other.

The story is complex and roughly chronological, with regular lurches forward and backward in time. The structure creates a sense of disorientation, which increases with the introduction of each new generation, which inevitably takes the names of some or all of its predecessors. There’s some realism to this, as family names are common, but I can’t help but feel that it was also a deliberate choice by Marquez to underscore the cyclical, Sisyphean nature of the family’s struggle. In any case, the profusion of José Arcadios and Aurelianos can be a challenge at times, not least because the family’s prodigious longevity and propensity for becoming ghosts can mean that five or six generations are in the story at the same time.

As with all translated books, I hesitate to comment about the prose, since it comes to me filtered ,but in this case I can only say that it reads beautifully, with lush, loping sentences overflowing with imagery, reaching nearly half a page at times. Bursts of absurdist humour leaven the largely tragic story, which, alongside the vicissitudes of life and death in a hardscrabble rural village, covers such pivotal events as war, political upheaval, and the encroachment of colonialism.

All told, it’s a brilliant book, and one I’m surprised I didn’t connect with more strongly the last time.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder

Max Boot’s book was fine, but The Bridge of San Luis Rey was a lovely palate cleanser after a dense tome on warfare—not simply for its slender page count, but for the spare, breathy urgency of its prose. Wilder wields a fleet style that I admire in no small part because I just can’t do it. His writing isn’t colloquial, but it gains its literary sheen without becoming comma-clotted and dense. It sits at the opposite end of a spectrum counterbalanced by Thomas Wolfe and WIlliam Faulkner, and while I can rival neither of those masters, I am much more an eager (if incompetent) disciple at their feet. With Wilder, I don’t even know where to start.

The book is interesting in structure as well as style, a quasi-religious meditation on causality and faith. The eponymous bridge lasts barely an instant, collapsing in the very first sentence only to be raised repeatedly through jaunts backwards in time. Five people fall to their death while attempting to cross it, and a devout friar named Brother Juniper seeks out every detail of their life in hopes of summising some grander purpose that will prove the existence of God.

Most of what follows is a biography of the five ill-fated individuals, with particular focus on three of them: the Marquesa de Montemayor, an epistolary savant pining after her indifferent daughter; Estaban, a man grieving his lost twin brother; and Uncle Pio, an avuncular figure managing a tempermental actress. Their stories intersect in different ways, some of which seem to defy their own causality (Im not sure if this is a deliberate effect, an error on Wilder’s part, or simply a result of my own misreading). Each chapter inevitably ends with the bridge’s collapse, lending a strange air of fatalism to the proceedings.

A great book. I’ll read more from him one day.