Bolivia: I Am a Taxi by Deborah Ellis

Diego, a 12-year-old boy, lives as an “honorary” prisoner with his mom and Corina, his 3-year-old sister, in San Sebastian women’s prison in Cochabamba.  His father is a prisoner in the men’s counterpart to Diego’s dwelling.  Unlike Corina, Diego was not born in captivity. He reminisce about the days when he enjoyed the contentment of domestic life in the coca plantation their parents worked until the day they were framed for possession of coca paste and were imprisoned.

Prison in Cochabamba is a sui generis institution. The women in San Sebastian can keep their kids with them during their confinement, they are to provide for their families and themselves while imprisoned, and they must rent a cell if they do not want to sleep in the prison’s courtyard. In order to earn a few Bolivianos that would keep his family fed, Diego did homework for his classmates and worked tirelessly as a courier for the women in the prison. Diego had to hurdle rude guards, gangs, and glue sniffers in order to carry his work as a taxi: a burden too heavy to carry with 12-year-old muscles.

Diego’s fenced environment resembles Bolivia’s lack of access to the sea. Once Diego realizes the impossibilities of breaking out of his reality and the unbearable length of his parents’ sentence, he decides to leave with his friend, Mondo, under the promise of a large amount of money. Instead of the way to riches, Mondo encounters a terrible death and Diego finds even more horrors working for cocaleros.

Deborah Ellis succeeds at showing us the anguish of child labor, the dreadful conditions of Diego’s life in San Sebastian women’s prison and his feelings of emptiness for not being able to share a life with both of his parents. Something I missed, however, was being able to appreciate Diego’s environment from a child’s point of view. Ellis’s Diego is too mature; it might be that the intention of the author was to eliminate childhood from his voice in the same way that childhood had been erased from his life. A Diego that could see the world through his 12-year-old eyes in spite of his maturity, or even supported by it, would have provided a fascinating narrative. I could see traces of this in Diego’s relationship with his sister Corina, and I was longing for an extension to the other realms of Diego’s subsistence. 

The book does not have an ending per se. After all Diego had gone through I needed closure, resolution. Especially because the author makes you feel Diego deserves it, as do all the Diegos and Mondos of Bolivia who have stepped on coca leaves, hazardous chemicals, and their own childhood while making coca paste.   

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Dominican Republic: The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

The Feast of the Goat describes the Trujillo era in the Dominican Republic in the same way that one would examine oneself in a three-way mirror: simultaneously looking at different perspective of the same object. Vargas Llosa presents us with these concurrent tripartite reflections coming from Urania Cabral, from the conspirators who killed Trujillo on March 30^th, 1961, and from Trujillo, the Goat itself. 

Urania Cabral is the daughter of Agustín Cabral, a member of Trujillo’s inner circle. She comes back to the Dominican Republic after an abrupt separation from her country that lasted 35 years. Her return prompts her to confess to her relatives how her father gave her, his only child, as an offering in the sacrificial stone to Trujillo. Urania, whose name is as exuberant as the Dominican landscape, music, cuisine, and passions, is the symbolic recipient of the gruesome kind of love Trujillo felt towards his country and the portrayal of the denial, forgetfulness, and resentment that frame these years for a share of the Dominican people.

Simultaneous to Urania’s confessions throughout the book, the men waiting for the car transporting Trujillo are remembering their own paths, all of which rendezvous at the finish line with the decision to end the life of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, El Generalisimo. Vargas Llosa renders the killers of Trujillo in all the splendor of their humanity, dissecting with his pen their flaws, virtues, vices, emotions, and rationale. Each character is a masterpiece; Vargas Llosa takes a photograph of each of their souls and translates it to prose, one by one.

The third perspective comes from an account of the events of Trujillo’s last day. Each of his actions revealing his obsession with cleanliness, his devoutness to discipline, his despise for the Haitian ethnicity he shared as maternal inheritance, his cult to his personality, his ability to infuse fear and terror, his unbearable and penetrating gaze, and his disappointment on all the members of his family. Trujillo’s last days were full of frustration and irony; El Generalisimo’s will was law in the Dominican Republic, but his own body was contravening him through his withered virility and the ultimate humiliation of his incontinence.

After El Generalissimo died, Ramfis Trujillo, his illegitimate son, led a fierce revenge against all that were suspected in the assassination of his father. It hurts the description of these tortures, slaughters, intimidations, and carnages, some of the most graphic I have encountered in a book. Despite the violent bloodshed, it is one of those books that cannot be put down, and that cannot be forgotten.

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Ukraine: Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

When Jonathan, a young American Jew travels to Ukraine to look for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, he hires the services of Heritage Touring. His translator was Alex, a young Ukrainian whose usage of the English language is hysterical, and his driver was Alex’s blind grandfather accompanied by his nutty dog Sammy Davis Junior, Junior. The four of them hop on a car and embark on a quest that would “illuminate” their lives.

Foer knits the story with threads of complementary literary hues resulting in a pluralism of aha moments. The narrative jumps from past to present, from mysticism to reality, from Jonathan’s to Alex’s voice. While Jonathan writes the story of his ancestor’s village, often from a philosophical dimension, it is Alex’s voice the one that narrates their quest. Alex uses a thesaurus as an aid for his handicapped English, resulting in one of the most innovative resources to make humor by playing with words. I liked Alex’s literary voice so much that I caught myself hurrying through the non-Alex parts of the book. It is Alex who manifests as the true hero of this story, even though he calls Jonathan “the hero” when he refers to him in his narrative.

Alex’s incorrect use of synonyms, which hampers his ability to communicate in English, can be viewed as an analogy to the feeling of something that has been lost in translation. There are words that have no interpretation in another language regardless of how many options a thesaurus gives you. In that same way, there are types of memories that can’t be translated, they can only be remembered. Foer prompts the reader to experience things with memory, which he describes as the sixth sense of the Jewish people. After Foer introduces the question: “What does it remember like?”, everything is comprehended differently by the reader. For me this was the moment where everything got illuminated.  

As a writer, Foer is brilliant; a breath of literary fresh air. As a historian, however, he leaves some details out, like the many Ukrainians who also died protecting Jews. Perhaps it is not left out, perhaps this is stated subliminally through the interaction of Jonathan with Alex and Alex's grandfather.   

For me, a good book is one that makes you slow down when the weight of the book in your left hand is heavier than on your right hand; one that after you finish it, you can’t start another one because you don’t want to wash down the flavor it left on your emotional palate. Everything is Illuminated will leave you with the strangest of tastes, a depressing and at the same time hilarious taste which is so unique you want to reminisce about. This is, in the words of Alex, a very “premium” book.

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Republic of Congo: Little Boys Come from the Stars by Emmanuel Dongala

This is the story of a kid who was almost never born, as he himself expresses at the very opening of the book. He was born a whole day after his twin brothers, something that had never happened in the Congolese village the kid was from, and due to the inexplicable connotation this event had on his people, he was dubbed Matapari (trouble).

The day he was born, on the 20^th anniversary of Congo’s independence from France, an amalgam of witnesses was present: the most famous midwife of the region, his uncle (a cunning and unscrupulous politician in the making), a Muslim merchant, a catholic priest, and the Chief of Police representing the President of the Republic. Add to these assembly two American motorcycles, a roman bicycle, holy water, verses from the Koran, bodyguards, and an accidental one-shot salute, and you get the undertone that is going to be present throughout the book: a depiction of a side of Africa that is seldom exposed.

The novel takes place during the events occurring in the Republic of Congo after its independence and up to the onset of democracy, as seen through the eyes of a 15-year-old whose fascination with Coca-Cola I found amusing. The novel satirizes the inconsistencies and surrealities that occur under communist governments, exponentially amplified by its pairing with dictatorial regimes and serial coup d’ètat. The satirical tone of the novel is more effective since it is expressed through the voice of a kid who is involuntarily caricaturizing his circumstances.

 

The main aim of the author’s ridicule is politics and the damage done to African countries by the dishonesty and ignorance of those in power, who are embodied in the character of Boula Boula, Matapari’s uncle. Boula Boula is dubbed by the people “Comrade FARCE” after the initials of his position in the government and when talked about nepotism he thinks it is a business opportunity.  Matapari’s unassuming satire also hits religion through his observations of Father Boniface, the Catholic priest, and his own mother, a devout Catholic who realizes through the course of the novel that prays need to be accompanied by a tightening of her boubou wraparound skirt in order to fight.

Once the novel is read, the aftertaste can best be described by a quote taken from the book: "...life is lots of gray clouds in a great blue sky."

Book available at Amazon/Kidle