The Lieutenant of San Porfirio by Joel D Hirst

Something is afoul in the Revolutionary Socialist Republic of Venezuela. Despite food shortages, blackouts and the terrible violence, El Comandante's iron grip is stronger than ever. Newly decorated Lieutenant Juan Marco Machado lovingly caresses his shiny AK-103 as he thinks about his promotion and what he would be willing to do to defend his revolution, and his position. He is about to find out it's more than he ever would have believed. Doña Esmeralda is in trouble. Ordered to demonstrate her solidarity for the revolution and open her colonial mansion (in which she carefully protects her dead husband's ghost) to the barrio dwellers, she decides she is left with no choice but to plot a counterrevolution. Meanwhile, Freddy, an American high school student is propelled by his parents to attend a socialist youth summit in Venezuela, pitting him against Pancho Randelli, a freedom activist and leader of the struggling student movement. And so the fates of four people are about to be intertwined within a country plunged into revolution. The Lieutenant of San Porfirio is the compelling story about four people seeking to find themselves under the chilling pall of socialism. People from different backgrounds and across the hemisphere will find something to love, as well as something deeply disturbing, in this new magical realism twist on a South American classic genre, the dictator novel.

 Amazon Description

This book combines comedy with serious political commentary. In Latin America, which Joel Hirst is familiar with and which he clearly loves and cares passionately about, that is the reality, a reality which is mixes with magic in this excellent novel. 

The comedic is always close to a serious, even tragic, consequence, as exemplified in the character of Lieutenant Machado, who at first appears to be a bumbling drunken fool, but morphs into Porfirio's Head of Security, recruiting a sadistic interrogator. That that interrogator is said to have been the child of a magical being shows how the magic works in this novel. Further examples are Machado's spies - a man who seems able to turn himself into an owl, or the servants at Dona Esmerelda's country club who were specially bred to be invisible. The magic in this book is not on the side of the freedom activists. 

Reading the book blurb I was not sure whether I would enjoy the book, fearing that it would be too politically right-wing for me. This is a shame as I was pleased to see that the book shows an understanding of the motivation of all the main characters, nor does it portray the opponents of the revolution in a universally good light - Dona Esmerelda, the old oligarch, is a selfish elitist, but: each had been searching in their own way for freedom and for meaning. All in different places and by different means.  The book is very good at showing how the most laudable of aspirations can be perverted.  On a minor point Mr Hirst and his publisher should note that democratic socialism has many supporters in the UK and other European countries, where it does not mean the same as it does in the Americas, so references in the description to the chilling pall of socialism will put off potential buyers.

The book weaves together the story of the four characters - the naive American youth Freddy, Lieutenant Machado, the activist student leader Pancho and Dona Esmerelda - as they move to the inevitable violent showdown. If I were to make a criticism of this book it is of how this happens. The story is told by an omniscient narrator, who allows us to see that the Lieutenant knows about the others' plans. This reduces the dramatic suspense to that of watching a slow-motion car crash. At the end it seems that the book is the first in a series and that more will be revealed in future books. I look forward to reading them. 

I recommend this book to you. 

The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis

A gripping and lyrical story—at once expansive and lush with detail—this debut novel is a deeply intimate exploration of the search for love and authenticity, power and redemption, in the lives of three women, and a penetrating portrait of a small, tenacious nation, Uruguay, shaken in the gales of the twentieth century.

On the first day of the millennium, a small town gathers to witness a miracle and unravel its portents for the century: the mysterious reappearance of a lost infant, Pajarita. Later, as a young woman in the capital city—Montevideo, brimming with growth and promise—Pajarita begins a lineage of fiercely independent women. Her daughter, Eva, survives a brutal childhood to pursue her dreams as a rebellious poet and along the hazardous precipices of erotic love. Eva’s daughter, Salomé, driven by an unrelenting idealism, commits clandestine acts that will end in tragedy as unrest sweeps Uruguay. But what saves them all is the fierce fortifying connection between mother and daughter that will bring them together to face the future.

From Perón’s glittering Buenos Aires to the rustic hills of Rio de Janeiro, from the haven of a corner butchershop in Montevideo to U.S. embassy halls, the Firielli family traverses a changing South America and the uncharted terrain of their relationships with one another.

Goodreads Description

I was expecting to be disappointed by this book. With its similarities to Allende's House of Spirits (three generations of women living through times of oppression), I thought it would suffer in comparison, that it might be light South American magic realism. I was pleasantly surprised. I really enjoyed the book and found that it stood on its own as a piece of literature.

The magic realism in the book is more obvious at the beginning of the book with the miracle of Pajarita's survival and fades as we move further into the rationalist twentieth century and away from the rural setting to the urban. However, there was throughout the book a sense of returning imagery, of poetry and words, that is magic realist:  her pen moved and moved without her hand seeming to push it, forming the spines and spikes and loops of cursive words, sharp t’s and j’s, y’s and g’s with knots at their base as though to tie themselves together, tie women back together, and as she wrote the loops grew large, as if more rope were needed to bind what had blown apart inside her.

One of the book's strengths is the author's portrayal of the psychology of the main characters. They are not perfect, they are at times unattractive, but we are shown how their faults are the product of their experiences and sometimes genes. The best example of this is Eva's story.  Having suffered sexual abuse at the hand of her employer and family friend, she finds it hard to trust and relate to men. She manipulates her husband, a good man, into marrying her and giving her the economic security she craves, but that is not enough. She is oppressed by the upper bourgeois life she must lead as his wife, she is living a lie. It cannot last. This reader's sympathies was with both of them.

If I were to criticize this book, I would point out the way in which Pararita and then Eva fade into the background as the focus shifts on to the story of the next generation. I was loathe to lose them and their point of view. Nevertheless the author does a good job of weaving recurring imagery and themes through the generations to give a continuity.  The major theme of the book is of course motherhood and specifically mothers and their daughters. There is a wonderful description of Eva with her children: Eva could walk down the street- one child's hand in each of hers - and be struck by a fierce and sudden gale of happiness. It made her want to skip and run and kick up puddle water and pursue the sensuous crunch of brown leaves beneath her boot. So much opulent sensation on one sidewalk. 'Salomé, you get that one!' Small galoshes crushed a leaf, another, and two giggles (a three-year-old's, her mother's) mixed with the crackling sound.  Any mother will know that sensation of sudden maternal joy. 

With Salomé's story the politics of Uruguay come to the fore. Again Salomé's motivations for her actions are well-drawn. Although she actively chooses to get involved in revolutionary politics, she also slides into it, influenced as much by friendship as by youthful zeal. But the theme of motherhood is still there in Salomé's story and the book ends as it begins with Salomé writing to the daughter who does not know her story. 

I recommend this book to you. 

What is Magic Realism

This is the first day of the Magic Realism Blog Hop. Twenty bloggers are taking part, so when you have finished reading this blog post pop along to the other blogs (see the links below).  

On the 29th July this blog will be one year old. I started the blog as a way of ensuring I finish my magic realism challenge - to read a book a week for a year. And the reason I started the challenge was because I was told I wrote magic realism, but I didn't know what that meant. By reading 52 books, I hoped to have an answer. I deliberately read as widely as possible, both in terms of geographical origin and genre. So what have I discovered?

The first thing I discovered is that there is no easy definition and that there are a number of interpretations of what magic realism is. 

There seem to be three main strands of magic realism. The first is what one might call Latin American magic realism, exemplified by the works of Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In this form of magic realism, "magical" events are treated as normal occurrences in an otherwise realist world and are not commented on. This magic realism strand is informed by the coming together of two cultures in a post-colonial world: the western realist/rationalist (and dominant) culture and the "magical" indigenous cultures of South America. Whether the post-colonial context is essential is open to debate, but this mixing of two cultures with different belief structures has become so frequent a theme in magic realism, that arguably it is essential to the definition. Examples of this "two cultures" magic realism are not restricted to South America, but also include native American writers such as Silko and Erdrich, Jewish writers such as Alcala and even Kafka, British South Asian writers like Rushdie and Afro-American writers such as Toni Morrison. Arguably this definition also applies to feminist magic realism, such as that by Angela Carter and Virginia Woolf. 

Then there is the European strand. The roots of the European magic realism are in the surrealist and post-expressionist movements. The first use of the phrase "magic realism" was by art critic Franz Roh in 1925 when writing about the post-expressionist movement: 

We recognize the world, although now - not only because we have emerged from a dream - we look on it with new eyes. We are offered a new style that is thoroughly of this world, that celebrates the mundane. This new world of objects is still alien to the current idea of Realism. It employs various techniques that endow all things with a deeper meaning and reveal mysteries that always threaten the secure tranquility of simple and ingenuous things.

For me this definition is still important: everyday things having deeper-than-expected meaning seems to be a key element of magic realism. 

This European strand has an approach that is very different from Latin American magic realism. It is more self aware, so much so that metafiction regularly features in some leading magic realist novels, such as Life of Pi, or If On a Winter's Night A Traveller. To show that my attempt at definition is fraught with problems, some of the best examples of this approach come from outside of Europe, such as works by Borges and Murakami. And there are plenty of common roots for both strands. Franz Kafka is in many ways not a magic realist writer, he is too surrealist, but he is remarkably influential on the development of magic realism. Arguably he is the root of magic realism - it was his story Metamorphosis that inspired Marquez to write as he does. 

There is a third strand, which is what might be termed popular magic realism. This uses magic realism as a story-telling technique. The magic can be a way of showing the psychology of characters, such as in the Tooth Fairy, or of exploring alienation, such as in The Story Sisters. It can be used to show religious and non-rationalist beliefs that exist even in western society, for example in Fludd. Or it can simply be used to add a touch of magic.

Magic realism in all these strands questions the nature of "reality". In some ways it is unfortunate that it is called magic realism. In the context of our world, which is dominated by rationalism and science, the term "magic" often implies unreality. However magic realism allows the writer to draw a world where there are alternatives to rationalism. It might be better described as "alternative realism". 

Please follow the links below to take you to posts on magic realism from lots of other bloggers. And please come back here tomorrow and Wednesday, when there will be two more posts as part of the blog hop. And there's a giveaway too - a collection of magic realist e-books and a Kafka bookmark. See the Rafflecopter below. Remember leaving a comment on this post gets you an entry.