This is the first of de Bernieres' Latin American trilogy, set in a fictional South American country, heavily resembling Colombia (but with elements from many other Latin American countries as well). The plot follows multiple story lines and protagonists, including several villagers in the town of Chiriguaná, who are terrorized by corrupt militia, and the selfishness of the local landowners, and eventually decide to fight back. Other parts of the story show the terrible corruption of the military, with thousands of ordinary citizens of the country disappearing without a trace, being tortured and killed in the hunt for dissidents and communists.

The story mixes horribly graphic descriptions of violence, rape, torture and death with humour, colourful descriptions and magical realism. During the course of events, the village of Chiriguaná is suddenly overrun with huge amounts of black cats who grow to be the size of panthers. There's even occasions where donkeys and women give birth to black kittens. It's a wonderfully written book, but not exactly an easy read, and it took me longer to get through than I had expected, simply because the subject matter was both wonderful and horrible, and while fictionalized, clearly based on real events that have taken place in South and Latin America in the last half a century. I was planning on reading the trilogy in one go, but felt I had to space out my reading more after finishing this one. Can absolutely be recommended, but is not for the squeamish or faint of heart.

I recently read One Hundred Years of Solitude and didn't really get it. So I'm glad I picked this up now, because I think I understand better now about South American magical realism and what it's trying to do.

This is a sprawling story, with lots of characters from all over the class spectrum. In a tiny town in an invented South American country, the digging of a canal to fill a swimming pool has consequences that ripple throughout the nation. This was sad and funny and satirical and inventive and lush. I loved all the characters, and how de Bernières balanced the gruesome with the farcical.

If you like sprawling novels with lots of complicated characters, definitely pick this up.

A slow-burn of magic realism that enthralls more and more as you go along. Hilarious at parts, heartbreaking at parts, it elicits vocal emotions with its vibrant imagery and biting sarcasm and satire. Highly recommended to anyone who's a fan of the magic realism that has its home in South America.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin(1994) was my first encounter with Louis De Bernierès' writing. He reminded me so much of Giovanni Guareschi's tragicomedies (his Don Camillo tales-1950s), that I immediately pasted De Bernières onto my wall of exceptional writers. Combining dark sardonic humor, with brutality and surrealism, or magic realism, requires a fine mind and a strong sense of parody. That is what made Gabriel García Márquez the international bestseller that he was - and still is.

Louis De Bernières wrote a South American trilogy, consisting of:
1) The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts;
2) Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord;
3) The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman.

His characters are multiple. Here are a few:

Hectoro was an intelligent and intolerant man who looked on life very simply. A man needs women – he had three; he needs shelter – he had three; he needs money – he was foreman on the gringo’s hacienda; he needs status – he had his own mule, a revolver in a holster, leather bombachos, he could rope a steer with infallible precision, and he could hold alcohol in his wiry frame like no man else. The doctor had told him he was to die of liver failure because of the drink, and truly his skin had become yellowed; but he was proud and fiery-tongued, and he had threatened to shoot the doctor, who had then changed his diagnosis to something less disagreeable.
...
Don Emmanuel had become a local legend both on account of his delight in healthy dissolution, his choice of peasants as his natural friends, and his prodigious social concern. He had built the village school and employed Profesor Luis to teach not only knowledge but wisdom to the raggedy children; he paid a quarter more than any other patron in the whole department, and he adopted a method of making breezeblocks in a wooden lattice so that he could build a little house for each of his employees. It was in his Land-Rover that the whores went every Thursday for their check-up, he arbitrated in domestic disputes, he never failed to labour alongside his men, and many local women were able to testify that even the purest bred Negros were not more lusty nor more satisfying than he was. The only thing that they thought unacceptable about him was that he would always refuse to smoke, a quirk that was considered anti-social in a land where everyone of peasant stock, man, woman and child always had a large cigar stuck in their mouth, where only effeminate oligarchs smoked cigarettes, and where pipes were smoked only by French engineers and English alpinists. These cigars are, like their coffee, easily the most sublime in the world, but of both commodities they keep the best to themselves, exporting only the dross for the world’s connoisseurs to praise. To smoke one of those cigars outdoors of an evening in a hammock whilst drinking half a litre of thick black coffee is to condemn oneself unknowingly to a lifetime of nostalgia.
...
And it was the mountains that General Fuerte loved the most, for as one proceeds through the altitudes, the climate and the life change through three distinct stages. For the first seven thousand feet it is the Garden of Eden, a luxuriance of orchids, humming-birds, and tiny streams of delicious water that run by miracle alongside every path. Above this height for three or four thousand feet is a world of rock and water draped like hanging gardens with alien, lunar plants in shades of brown and red and yellow with a habit so curious and enchanted as to be found in books of legend and romance. Above this is the Venusian world of ice, of sudden reckless mists of palpable water, of lichen and trickling springs, of fragmenting shale and glistening white peaks, where human realities become remote and ridiculous, where the sky is actually below you and inside you, where breathing is an accomplishment in itself, and where condors, inconceivably ponderous and gigantic, wheel on the upcurrents like lords of a different and fantastic universe.

The novel explores the characters and stories of an imaginary town in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Margarita region of South America. There is a distinct class difference but when the trouble began, and their destiny became uncertain, all prejudice vaporized into thin air.

Don Emmanuel had some trouble to fit linguistically into the groove. He was regarded as an outstanding boor, since he refused to alter or modify his peasant accent. His Spanish left tears, laughter and misunderstandings behind wherever he went. Whatever he tried to communicate left the impression of sarcasm behind. Careta, his bay horse had a sense of humor, but was also a pasero, a horse who was trained not to trot, but to move at a steady, undulating lope. This was the one pace at which Don Emmanuel never rode it, so it had not only a sagging back, but also the depressed, irritated and frustrated air of a natural artist whom financial straits have reduced to taking a job as a bank clerk.

Dona Constanze wanted to divert the Mula river to feed her swimming pool. Some inhabitants would be seriously affected, devoided of water at their homes and lands. Don Emmanuel's irrigation scheme would also be affected. He was tasked to negotiate with her in his particular brand of Spanish.

n  'It has come to my ears, dear lady, that you intend to divert with a canal the very river which waters my land and that of the campesinos in order to replenish your piscina. I must say, as I know you appreciate frankness, that I and the local people will be fucked, buggered and immersed in guano of the finest Ecuadorean provenance before we permit such a thing to occur.’

'The permission,' she rallied, her temper rising almost immediately beyond control, 'is not yours or theirs to grant. I will do as I wish with the water on my land.'

'I appeal,' said Don Emmanuel, 'to your highly-developed social conscience and to your concern for my nether parts.'n

Don Emmanuel had a strong case about his dingleberries. Only water could solve his dingleberry problem. Dona Constanze won't have none of it.... and so the story continues...

After the canal digging got skillfully sabotaged by the diggers, Dona Constanze had a brainwave. She rented a bulldozer.

n  The bulldozer took one month to arrive from Asuncion, two hundred kilometres away. It was not just that the machine was slow, which it was, nor that the roads were appalling, which they were; it was simply that the driver was easily bribed into doing all sorts of lucrative little oddjobs along the way, especially as he revelled in the people’s admiration for the awesomeness of the feats that his beloved machine could perform with magical ease. He gave free demonstrations to interested knots of people who never tired of seeing trees pulled over to no purpose, and huge fearsome bulls dragged along by a rope around the horns despite their having their hooves firmly planted against the soil and all their muscles straining. Halfway to the pueblo he had to turn back to Asuncion to fetch more diesel.n

It is a tale of absurdity and make-believe(yet sadly a portrayal of true events), an equivalent to Cormack McCarthy's savage cruelty. It is the male counterpart of Isabel Allende's South American novels. You need a strong stomach to endure. But the endearing, lovable characters and the atmospheric descriptions of a magnificent world kept me going and going and going...I had to do it in several sitting, though. The cruelty and barbarity just got to me. Not that it is the first time I encountered it. It is part of our human story throughout history. And so familiar in the rest of the world too.

Somewhere between those pages, you will find the South American version of Tevye (or Tevye the Dairyman) in Fiddler On The Roof, or Zorba, the Greek. The villagers had their own G.I. Jane, with the attitude of Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) in the 1983 film Sudden Impact. Remedio was...tough...honorable...heroic...and beautiful. A Go ahead, make my day kinda young woman. Sprinkled all over the mountains, the animals and the people, concupiscence bounced the story up and down the formidable mountains.

Wikipedia : Set in an imagined Latin American country, the novel's political themes parody the worst excesses of the Pinochet government of Chile, the collapse of democratic social order in Uruguay in the 1970s, the Colombian Armed Conflict between the military and communist guerrillas and other dirty wars of the 1960s to 1980s in Southern and Central America. The main action of the story takes place in the small town of Chiriguaná, whose population is richly drawn in affectionate character portraits that make up a large part of the novel. Other parts of the novel take place in the capital city of the fictional nation, in the clubs of the corrupt military commanders, and the palace of the distracted, amoral president.

Although the name of the country of the trilogy is never directly disclosed, several reasons cause it to most resemble Colombia. De Bernières' experiences from spending time living in Colombia will probably have influenced its setting. Geographically, references are made to the country's equatorial climate, its northern coastline on the Caribbean, western coastline on the Pacific Ocean and the mountain range of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Margarita, which is similar to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The Colombian town of Valledupar, in the Cesar Department, and Medellín are commonly mentioned, and the fictional town of Chiriguaná bears the same name as the Colombian town Chiriguaná. In the sequel to the novel, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord, the notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar (thinly disguised under a pseudonym) is a central character. The book sarcastically describes the 'democratic' politics of the country as the result of 'La Violencia', whereby two political parties jointly ruled on alternating administrations. There is a clear parallel between this and the National Front regime of Colombia, which followed on from La Violencia and lasted from 1958 to 1974, in which the Liberal and Conservative parties governed jointly.

Often hilariously funny--I barked indecent laughter at the world at times--; other times breathtakingly sad, it remains a tale to be read, and above all, experienced. De Bernières is a master storyteller.

RECOMMENDED, I would say.

Louis De Bernieres’s book The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts should be both widely read and widely taught. To put such praise in context, in the scores of books I’ve reviewed this is the first and only time I’ve been so moved by my reading experience to offer that kind of an unconditional lead sentence endorsement. The book is both thoughtful and entertaining. Its magical elements introduce the possibility of figurative readings that go beyond those that ordinary realism can efficiently deliver and its characters, lovingly caricatured, are refreshingly unburdened of the navel-gazing sensibilities that so effectively conspire against proper pacing in many contemporary works of realist fiction. De Bernieres’s real magic, though, is in the palpable, material quality of the book’s action—The Battle of Chiriguana, which recounts a peasant wedding and the celebratory food fight that follows, is the single most agreeable chapter of fiction I’ve ever read—and its language—his chapter-long description of the teeming, perpetually dusk jungle is a tour of thick, descriptive force guaranteed to make you squirm with rot even while outfitted comfortably in your plush recliner. De Bernieres's gift for instructive parody is also readily apparent; his panning of military and civilian leaders alike in the fictional South American country he has created is laden with hilarity and prescience.

It’s difficult to imagine a more humanizing introduction to La Violencia and Latin America’s dirty wars. Some may of course object to my characterization, but to do so is to confuse humanization with that which we often think of as humanizing, but which is really just the sentimental portrayal of victimization. If the book is indeed “tragicomic” as so many readers are wont to describe it, it is not because of the violence of the fictional world de Bernieres has created—it barely registered on my sentimentimeter—but rather because it is so painfully recognizable to even the most elementary students of the region’s history. It is humanizing because it reminds us, bluntly, of all the barbarous things of which humans are capable. De Bernieres writes as if looking through what I imagine to be a wide-angle lens positioned at a distant remove from his creation. This has the didactic effect of making his message widely applicable. Having just learned of the legendary Hatem of Egypt, a corrupt police officer who routinely uses torture to shake down his victims in the aptly named 2007 movie This Is Chaos, I couldn’t help but think of The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts and how it is very little a story of the Americas alone, and very much a story of all the many places where humans are brutal, savage, and corrupt.

How amazing would it be were Bernieres’s book to be required reading in every undergraduate political philosophy course. Don Emmanuel is of course a classic Diogenean character, but think moving students from some dry academic treatise on the rule-of-law to the irreverent and deliciously tangible world that De Bernieres has brought into being. Consider: an entire generation of young people raised to associate human rights not with legalistic, feel-good pronouncements and universal declarations but with the image of a man’s penis being shocked with an electric cattle prod, or a woman being raped by a rogue soldier. Is there any better portrayal of how absolute power corrupts absolutely than De Bernieres's portrait of Colonel Asado? Eric Hobsbawm once said that Machiavelli so enjoyed the truth “not only because it is true but also because it shocks the naive.” It’s a sentiment that Louis De Bernieres no doubt appreciates. This is chaos. Let the naive read The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts over and over again. Please. © Jeffrey L. Otto, September 18, 2018

This is the first of Louis de Bernières Latin American Trilogy and his debut novel. Although I was drawn in from the beginning, it seemed at first that the story was too fragmented. There are a lot of characters making up several groups of characters, each having its own plot line. I was inclined to want more of the one with Don Emmanuel and his nether parts, much of which was laugh out loud funny. But this novel is also described as tragicomic. In fact, one of the plot lines is particularly dark and some may set this aside because of it.

I wondered if I would be able to keep all the characters and plot lines straight. I needn't have worried. de Bernières manages to weave them together into a whole. Usually we can expect a South American novel to have aspects of magical realism, and there are those parts. There are also parts where he exaggerates magical realism taking it to absurdity. Or at least it seemed so to me.

There is the war of the title, but it is not what most of us would think of war. There are many factions in this fictitious Latin American country, most made up of either very right-wing or very left-wing. de Bernières lived for a few years in Colombia. The country of the trilogy is made up of a corrupt army, inept politicians, peasants, communist revolutionaries, with a few rich oligarchs thrown in for good measure. In order for the peasants to survive, bribing the officials was a requirement. The mayor was also the local policeman, which engendered a desirable reduction in local bureaucracy and meant that only one man needed to be bribed rather than two; for this reason the locals were also trying to get him appointed as magistrate and gobernador.

I found the prose itself complex enough to remark to myself about it more than once. On the other hand, there were times when he listed things in such a way that it became ridiculous - undoubtedly his purpose at that point of the novel. I enjoyed this novel more as I got deeper into it. I definitely plan to read the second in the trilogy soon, and we'll see if I can figure out how to squeeze in the third too. I hesitate to give this 5-stars, but I did love it. So there it is.

This is de Bernières’ first novel I think and it’s interesting to see how his later style is developing, with different sections devoted to very different characters and story types and with other sections devoted to history, politics, local traditions, and other typically “nonfiction” topics. I can see the writer of Corelli’s Mandolin developing here.

The influences behind this novel are clear: (1) de Bernières spent time teaching English in Colombia and that is clearly the unnamed republic in the book and (2) he must also have spent time reading Latin American authors, specifically Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The novel seems to combine the typical hot steamy novel set in an hopelessly unruly banana republic with the rollicking fun and magical realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude. There’s a good jolt of political satire with a point of view on history that’s different from both the banana republic novels and from Latin American magical realism. It is not quite its author’s own voice—more a trying on and modification of other author’s voices—and I suspect readers of de Bernières’ mature novels will initially be a bit disappointed.

Still once the story gets going, readers will marvel at the author’s humor and inventiveness and rush on to finish it. Starting with the spoiled lady who wants to divert a river to fill her swimming pool and the fat, stupid, brutal army officer the novel progresses through giant cats and laughing plagues, political disappearances a lá Argentina, and the founding of Cochadebajo de los Gatos (“a city of cats beneath a lake”) which figures in the de Bernières’ continuation of the saga—The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman.

3 STARS

"A story of life, love and politics in South America. When the spoilt and haughty Dona Constanza tries to divert a river to fill her swimming pool, she starts a running battle with the locals. The Government sends a squadron of soldiers led by the fat, brutal and stupid Figueras to deal with them." (From Amazon)

I wasn't really interested in the subject matter but the writing is well done.

It has a great many ideas but often seems like de Bernieres is just using them without reason. When it's good, it's very good, it has the power to be charming, heartfelt, shocking and humorous all at the same time (the chapter introducing of Parlanchina is a great example). Unfortunately, some of the less powerful ideas drag the pace, especially when each idea rarely has any significance in later chapters of the book. It's more like 40 odd loosely connected short stories about a fictional south American community. There is a lot going on to be admired, but the lack of conventional structure means that when the book is good, it can be great, and when its mediocre, it can terribly dull.

What a book, what a writer! Once again I am reading a trilogy out of sequence - perhas this is nor such a bad idea. I started with the "Senor Vivo" and many characters and happenings were a bit of mystery or puzzle to me but, consequently, even more magical. Now I know all about Aurelio the brujo, his adopted daughter, where is Cochadebaja de los Gatos and much more. So I can read and enjoy the second volume again with new understanding. Louis de Bernières' writing is much more than just a magical story, exotica and jokes. It is mainly his life philosophy that I like - not trusting any officialdom or any ideology from the right or left, love of people and embracing the complexities of our universe to the last drop. Could not wait to devour the third volume of the trilogy right after Christmas!

¡Me había olvidado de que hace dos décadas leí los libros de De Bernières! Qué cabeza, por favor, si son fantásticos. Este fue el primero que leí y su complicada y muy ajustada trama tiene muchos momentos divertidos, escondidos detrás de un horror auténtico a la fiera más espantosa del mundo: nosotros.
Literatura de alta calidad, chicos. Algo que casi nunca leo, jaja.

Bernieres is one of my favourite authors - he has written two of my favourite books of all time - Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Birds Without Wings. There is no one better suited for the epic historical novel, capable of writing in a heartfelt manner about everyday people faced with circumstances and events outside of their control threatening to uproot their life.
In Captain Corelli's Mandolin, his focus was on a small Grecian town during the Second World War while in Birds Without Wings he concentrated his attention on the Armenian Genocide and the cruelty inherent in religious violence.
The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether parts reveals the seeds of greatness in Bernieres while displaying the lack of restraint and excess that seem to characterise first time authors. Also, personally, I am not a fan of magical realism and Bernieres is at his best when he approaches history as it was and not as he wishes it would be.
I will definitely read the sequels, in my own time.