It seems to be an idiosyncrasy of novels set in Latin American countries that there must be: underlying or overt sexual yearning, gratuitous violence and miscommunications, duplicitous actions verging on the ridiculous, corrupt government and mystical events. The penchant for the ridiculous seems to have been a standard set in Don Quixote transferred to Latin America by a conquistador heritage and amplified by sexual yearning. Whilst I have not read extensively on the Latin American theme, I can draw on knowledge of Laura Esquivel, "Like Water for Chocolate" Miguel de Cervantes, "Don Quixote"- given the colonial root- Isabel Allende, "The House of the Spirits" which all carry similar themes. I will read another Lois De Bernieres to clarify whether Hollywood sanitised my two other favourites: "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" and "Red Dog" and to bare whiteness to whether these two have continued the latent sexual tension and mystical connection or if it is in fact part of a genre that defines Latin America.

Wow. Stupendous. Magnificent. This ranks right up there with Garcia Marquez and Allende. Glorious Latin American magical realism. So wonderful to read every step of the way. Brilliant, insightful, incisive, sly. And every character so fully drawn--I could pick each one out in a crowd. To write like this, in epic proportions, drawing from all walks of life and all types of human reasoning... what a truly wonderful talent to have. Can't wait to read his other books.

Too bad that movie version of "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" was such drivel. Otherwise I might have discovered Bernieres long ago. Well, now is as good a time as ever.

A wonderful couple paragraphs about patriotism:

"There are two types of patriotism, although sometimes the two are mingled in one breast. The first kind one might call nationalism; nationalists believe that all other countries are inferior in every respect, and one would do them a favour by dominating them. Other countries are always in the wrong, they are less free, less civilised, are less glorious in battle, are perfidious, prone to falling for insane and alien ideologies which no reasonable person could believe, are irreligious and abnormal. Such patriots are the most common variety, and their patriotism is the most contemptible thing on earth.

The second type of patriot is best described by returning to the example of General Fuerte. General Fuerte did not believe in 'my country, right or wrong'; on the contrary, he loved his land despite the faults he could so clearly see and that he laboured to correct. It was his frequently stated opinion that anyone who supported their country when it was obviously in the wrong, or who failed to see its faults, was the worst kind of traitor. Whereas the first kind of patriot really glories in his own irrationality and not in his country, General Carlo Maria loved his country as a son loves his mother or a brother his sister."

Take that, George Bush.

Great book. The descriptions are incredibly vivid and wonderfully ironic. This is a wonderful piece of magical satire in the manner of Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. If you loved that book you should definitely read this one.

My only criticisms are the way the author bounced around telling the story in such an incongruous manner and the very short chapters (5-10 pages each for 363 pages). That being said, it might not have worked as well as a tradition linear story.

Regardless a nice read.

Life is nothing if not a random motion of coincidences and quirks of chance; it never goes as planned or as foretold; frequently one gains happiness from being obliged to follow an unchosen path, or misery from following a chosen one. How often can one refrain from wondering what portentuous events may not have arisen from some trivial circumstance which thereby has acquired a significance far beyond itself?

A spoiled matron wants to divert the local river in order to replenish the water in her stagnant pool. An Army General takes a vacation alone in the mountains to chase butterflies. Between them they inadvertently start a war in an imaginary Latin American republic. afictional place that is a synthesis, a distillation of all of them. Before attaining fame with his vivid description of rural life in the middle of World War II on a small Greek island, Louis de Bernieres flexed his literary muscles in this debut novel by painting an exuberant and subversive picture of life in an isolated village, somewhere between the Andes and the Amazonian jungle. Politics, mythology, black humour, economics, tragedy, war crimes, nature unleashed, bestial passion, religion, philosophy, death, new born life - the whole range of human experience is gravitating around the 'dingleberries' of Don Emmanuel, a British expat who renounced the dubious benefits of a higher education for the freedom and the laidback lifestyle of the tropics.

Don Emmanuel had attended Cambridge in order to study botany, and joined the Conservative, the Labour, the Liberal, and the Communist parties all at once 'to get a balanced view'.

On his first study trip to the Andes, Don Emmanuel decided to go AWOL, sample all the ladies in the local whorehouse and become a cattle farmer. Despite being the title character of the novel, Don Emmanuel is not much of an active character in the developing plot, preferring to act as an 'eminence gris' in an advisory capacity, and to let his charitable acts speak for themselves. Most of the story is told through the eyes of the villagers, a mix of former black slaves, descendants of the Incas, mestizos sharing blood from the Spanish conquistadores and the Indios, aboriginal tribes from the jungle, local and imported guerilleros, American investors and the odd French couple of expats. Opposing them in the incipient war are government soldiers led by inept officers, venal politicians, a trio of Army Chiefs of Staff dreaming of military dictatorship, death squads 'disappearing' leftist and dirty liberals, rapacious ministers and a scatterbrained president married to a pole dancer.

Bernieres acknowledges his debt to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the influence of the great storyteller is easy to discern in the earthy, exuberant lives of the local peasants, in the intrusion of magic into a cruel reality. A plague of laughter in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, an invasion of fast-growing cats, conversations with ghosts and miraculous healings of incurrable diseases , even ressurection of people dead and buried under a glacier for several centuries  are as much a part of the landscape as the mosquitos and the drug dealers. Pedro, the local hunter and witch doctor, knows the secret of life, bringing together the materials and idealist philosophical schools into a practical credo:

If you think for a minute, everything is natural, and everything is spirits.

I guess the comparison with Marques has its merits, but for me the tone of the novel is closer to the combination of black humour, sarcastic observations of human folly and deeply entrenched humanism that defines the work of Kurt Vonnegut. The reason for this is probably the fact that I read a month ago Galapagos , a fable of the future set in Ecuador and dealing like Don Emmanuel and his friends with political, economical and social dissolution. Of the two writers, and despite my long infatuation with Vonnegut, I must admit that de Bernieres is the better storyteller. His characters really come alive, their passions brought closer to the surface by the stifling heat and the fertility of the surrounding jungle. The joys of food, of dancing, of fornicating are in counterpoint to the squalor, the poverty, the threat of death waiting around every corner. Half-measures and timidity have no place in this world, and the bold who take their fate in their own hands will be the survivors. In his role of more or less disinterested witness of the proceedings, the French expat expresses in a letter what the illiterate peasants know deep in their bones:

And yet I still feel how glorious this country is, and how romantic. Even the moon is four times the size of that of France, and the birds and butterflies are indescribably beautiful and joyously coloured. The people too are brightly arrayed and seemingly always laughing and delighted. The soil is fertile and we have emeralds and oil, but it seems nothing ever comes of it. People here help each other for nothing, and yet no official will ever move a finger without a bribe - isn't that a contradiction? They love all mankind, these people, but kill each other with not a moment's thought!

Even the bad guys have a larger than life presence, like villains in an opera libretto. The small-scale invasion of an empty piece of rock in the ocean becomes a conflagration of epic proportions. A building project in the capital must surpass all the wonders of the world combined. A clueless president engages in tantric sex in order to reduce the national debt. Generals play with bombs like children with marbles. It is a fun ride, but de Bernieres knows how to bring the reader back to the cruel reality of 'collateral' victims: innocent Indians sprayed with napalm, children stepping on landmines, ten years old girls raped by the soldiers, liberals tortured in secret chambers and then killed and dumped on garbage landfills. Life in Latin America is cheap, and there is a too long history of insurgency and counter-insurgency fueled by 'manifest destiny' superpower ambitions, by drug dealers interference and by corporatist greed. The author manages a not too easy balancing act between right-wing and left-wing mentalities, lampooning both with equal gusto. His sympathies are clearly devoted to the impoverished and exploited villagers, who are concerned with survival and not with the power games played in the capital:

Eventually, in an historic feat of compromise, democracy was restored by the abolition of elections, and the two parties agreed to rule alternately for four years periods, thus postponing La Violencia indefinitely.

I was pleasantly surprised when, doing a little background research on the author, I found out that most of the events described in the book are grounded in actual developments from Chile, columbia, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela and other countries in the region. There is no need for fiction when reality provides such rich material for satire. Some of these events hit painfully close to home, as they mirror the venality of politicians and the ruthlessness of so-called foreign investors who are quick to drain a country of all its resources in the aftermath of a political upheaval, a situation Romanian people are already only too familiar with. Whole factories have been sold for scrap iron, and the ports are filled with cut timber for export:

In this way the country was completely de-industrialized as cheap foreign goods replaced local ones and foreign capital moved in to asset-strip the abandoned industrial base.

Latin America is known also for its machismo, for its male dominated society. I found it refreshing in Louis de Bernieres' approach to see women in a position of power, more than holding their own in the testosterone-filled environment. A hooker is elected to the village council, a spoiled landowner wife is awakened to passion when removed from her luxury mansion, the idealist student daughter of a banker is joining the guerilleros after being mistreated by the secret police. The strongest of them all, Remedios, a mountain girl, is the chosen leader of a band of revolutionaries:

We elected her when we realised that she had more brains and more balls than all of us put together.

I have already probably given away too much abot the building elements and main characters of the novel. I should probably have said more about the wonderful prose and the lush imagery of the countryside, perched between imposing mountains and impenetrable jungle. It's hard to believe this is a debut novel. Bernieres mastery of language and of plot is impressive, his familiarity with his subject the result of the years he spent in Columbia as a teacher. Small details hide behind the easy humour a deeply felt concern for the preservation of the natural wonders and of the cultural diversity of the whole continent, reduced for the purpose of the story to a single imaginary country. Here's a short exchange between Don Emmanuel and Aurelio, the Indian farmer on the subject of cutting trees from the jungle:

- "That tree is a quebracha, the wood is so hard that it can be used for paving roads. Try another one. [...] No, that is a rubber tree; it would be a waste. No, that is a brazil nut tree; it would be a waste. No, that is a sacred tree; it would offend Pachacamac.

In the end, Don Emmanuel gives up on his tree-felling project, unlike the many enterprises that thrive on clear-cutting the lungs of our planet.
The jungle is fascinating and full of wonders, but if I were offered a chance to visit the places described in the novel, I would set my goal on the Andes  just like the villagers who leave their original place in a march of biblical proportions .

The truth is that the mountains are a place where you can find whatever you want just by looking, as long as you remember that they do not suffer fools gladly, and particularly dislike those with preconceived ideas.

The next book in the series (a must read for me, after the fun I had with the present one), promises more adventures in the mountains, the jungle or the capital city. I'm hoping my favorite characters will fare well in the sequel, although with de Bernieres there is no guarantee of a happy ending, or even of a logical and compassionate universe:

You have to understand that some Gods have no more brains than a monkey, and play the same kinds of tricks.

Loved this! My first proper taste of magical realism, this satirical take on a Latin American 'everycountry' is often enlightening, sometimes depressing and always amusing. It feels especially and sadly relevant as the Venezuelan crisis unfolds in early 2019; a true demonstration of history repeating itself.

South American culture is something I've been underexposed to, but I was still able to identify the clichés and tropes that de Bernieres gently mocks. It's opened my eyes to that area of the world more, and left me eager to explore more writing about Latin history and politics. I like that the author presents a balanced portrayal of both positive and negative stereotypes of the Latin American way of life.

Would recommend to anyone with a sense of humour and curiosity about South America!

I guess the comparisons to Gabriel Garcia Marquez are inevitable, but come on, you could do much worse than be compared to THAT icon. And tho I absolutely adore Garcia Marquez, de Bernieres is more accessible and injects more humor in his amazing creations. If I could exist in any fictional world created by an author, it would be in this town. I cannot recommend this book, and the rest of his trilogy enough. Brilliant, hilarious, brutal, and vulgar. I am in love.

Not realising this came as part of a threesome, I read this trilogy in completely the wrong order! Not that it mattered, I still thoroughly enjoyed each installment and they work well as stand alone novels. This, the first part in the trilogy (which I read last) is no exception. De Berniere really is a genius - he's able to effortlessly blend heartbreak, spirituality, comedy, history, politics and fantasy in one superb novel. The characters are wonderfully drawn - in spite of the fact there's a large number of them - and, in the case of Colonel Asado, the author's description of a descent into violent, power-hungry villainy is extremely well described. At times a difficult read, because De Bernieres doesn't pull any punches when it comes to describing battle or torture, this is ultimately a book that celebrates love, life and the human spirit.

I loved Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. This, I didn't care for. The writing was nice, if rambling. Reminded me a bit of José Saramago. The book started strong but became tiresome as it wore on. It became clear that nothing was happening, many characters were abandoned, and the satire left something to be desired. Hard to follow, too, if you're not into it, which I wasn't.

Devoured on holiday in two short days, this a fine book by a skilled British author.

I had previously avoided De Bernieres following the hype and popularity of his Corelli novel - however when I was reccomended and read the superb 'Senor Vivo and the cocoa lords' I realised what I had been missing, and this book, another of his trilogy of latin american novels, is no exception.

A brilliant look at socio-political affairs in south & central america, through exaggeration, comedy and caricature this engrossing book tells a deep tale covering a smorgasbord of ethnic groups, class-and-scoietal levels and human stories, from the titular Don Emmanuel through the three armed forces leaders of De Bernieres ficticious country.

Superb.

It's the kind of book that you enjoy, nod knowingly and understand the author throughout, and only eventually blows you away. You don't realize you love everything about this book until you're done reading it and can't get that experience again.

de Bernieres has such a matter-of-fact style, a way of getting things across so bluntly but beautifully. The setting is so vivid and lush, while the situations can be so bleak and terrible. And it just all comes across as simple fact. I guess it's a real talent to be able to write something so easily absorbed by the reader yet profound.

That's the thing. This is mostly a fun book, with the title character being a big fat guy who walks around naked and makes potty-humor jokes. Maybe my gushing review of such material says more about me than the author, but there's really something special here I can't really describe. Wonderful book.

Was hard to get through the first half of this book as the perspective jumps around a lot and it is difficult to keep track of all the characters. But I am so glad I stuck with it. Was hilarious, beautiful, and terribly sad. Magic realism at its best.

Decently entertaining