Válka o zadnici dona Emanuela je zvláštní směsicí magického realismu, šílených nápadů, tajemného pralesa s všudypřítomnými duchy, černého humoru i střízlivé reality hrůz života v totalitní zemi zmítané občanskými nepokoji a zlovůlí vládnoucí vojenské kliky. Kvůli tomu všemu je zasazení fiktivní země do prostředí jižní Ameriky nabíledni a přes všechny nadpřirozené jevy (nutně potřebuju domácí kočku velikosti koně) lze lehce nabýt dojmu, že toto všechno by se koneckonců klidně mohlo stát. Lidé jsou šílení, obzvlášť pokud jde o vidinu moci.

Ne úplně typická kniha, která by šla jednoznačně žánrově zařadit. Rozhodně si ale zaslouží být přečtená - už jen kvůli kouzelnému jazyku a povedenému překladu.

De Bernieres' preposterous and satirical work is loaded with tongue-in-cheek observations concerning the machinations of nation states based on his creation of an imaginary Latin American country. An endless battle is going on there between the government, the military, and guerilleros (many are communist) with civilians more or less suffering the consequences. The Campasinos (peasants) and Indians are subjected to many horrors (described with detail and variety) but also have a penchant for ribald hilarity and end up in a biblical scale and magical exodus.
The 'f' word is used consistently throughout, but as a verb, not an adjective. Consistent with this, there is regular happy taunting about the size of cojones. For me, a "guy" book but what an imagination and he sure can write. My favorite: when during the exodus the people are beset with a plague of cats (which grow into amicable panthers) and delay their pursuers- tripping up the advancing soldiers by playing with their shoelaces."

Only for die hard fans of magical realism

Wildly imaginative, yet it felt more like a collection of short stories than a novel. Some of its prose was magical, even more than the stories themselves. But it somehow did not add up to a satisfying whole and perhaps it was due to its lack of a protagonist. Or having too many of them.

As a Latin American, it took me the several chapters to get used to its intentional mish mash of ethnic groups, myths, events from different parts of the subcontinent. Imagine a novel set in the XVI century that mixed historical facts and traditions from France, England, Spain and Germany as if they were a single country and you'll get the idea.

About half of it I enjoyed a lot. The other half was a tougher ride.

[ I use a pass / fail grading, where 1=Would not Recommend and 5=Recommend]

Nejdřív jsem si říkala, že to vůbec není téma pro mě. Ale zaujalo mě jihoamerické prostředí, kam moc ráda jezdím na dovolenou. Moc se mi líbí překlad, takže jsem i pokračovala a postupně se mi to víc a víc začínalo líbit. Některé pasáže mi nedělaly dobře. Jsem na to mučení čímdál víc měkká. Ale bylo to psané celé s takovou lehkostí, že i ty těžší pasáže se daly bez újmy překonat.
Teď zjišťuju, že je to první díl trilogie, takže je jasné, že se budu muset pustit i do dalších dílů.

Another book chosen by a member of my book club that really was a truly terrible read. Not only would I not recommend it to anyone, but I'd actively tell them to avoid it.

This book doesn't do anything right. The start is a good example of things. In a very short space of time we're introduced to 6 or 7 different characters, told a lot about them, and then are expected to not only care about them, but to be able to remember who is who when they turn up again later, even as more characters are introduced. So not only do we not learn much about them, but we're told a lot of stuff instead of actually be shown any of it, a classic sign of a poor writer.

This brings me to my next big quibble, the voice of the story. Due to the huge cast and the fact that the author felt the need to add all kinds of extraneous information not necessary for the story, we are quite distant from each of the characters. Therefore the voice is an omniscient narrator that takes a haughty view of things at times like 'Our characters' that is just plain annoying and goes back to us being told a lot of things about a lot of people, places & situations instead of being shown them. This makes the reader distant from what is going on and, frankly, far less interested in it all. It also gets irritating when this voice tries to tell us what to feel about a situation like how we must "look on in awe" at something that has been poor described and is both uninteresting and boring.

Then we have the tone. It is clear that the author thinks he is being funny and clever at various points as the way sentences are structured or phrased is clearly meant to be tongue in cheek and is so over exaggerated that it isn't an accident. The only problem? The humor completely and utterly fails and so the whole thing falls flat on its face. Therefore we're left seeing where we should have laughed but being completely unable to even crack a smile as the crafting is so bad.

To go along with this, the author feels the need to show each and every possibility when describing things, so the narrative gets bogged down in lists that completely break the flow of a scene and make it really hard for the reader to not just skip ahead a few lines. Just look at this single example:
"He was oppressed and horrified by the merciless buzzing of the mosquitoes, the calls of the trumpeter birds, the shrieks of the black-faced howler monkeys with their hideous goitred necks, the sounds of trains mysteriously created by ducks in flight, the prehistoric grunts of caimans, the strange greetings of tapirs, sounding exactly like 'Hi!', the irritating cracking of fingers made by the ageronia butterflies, the ringing of bells made by some mysterious fish beneath his raft, the outraged idiotic squawks of hundreds of different kinds of parrots, the coughs of the forest fox, the chatting of the anis birds, the demonic laughter of otters, the unearthly beautiful song of the white-eared puff birds, the unnerving nocturnal hilarity of the laughing hawk, the 'Koro! Koro!' of the cayenne ibis, the piping of guans, the jaguar calls of the tiger heron, the rattles of the cocoi heron, and, worst of all, the demented scrapings of armies of gigantic crickets."
One sentence, 10 lines long & with 157 words! Seriously?! Who the hell edited this book, or rather didn't do so? Give a few examples of what you mean and move on, don't list each and every example that you can possible think of! By the time you get to the end of such a list you need to glance back up to remember what was going on in the first place.

The editing comment really is at the heart of a lot of this book's problems. The rushed beginning, overly wordy narrative and drawn out story all could have been made thousands of times better if this book had just seen even a single decent editor. They probably would have also realized that throwing lots of Spanish into the mix probably wasn't a good idea either, especially not when the meaning of the Spanish words can't be derived from the sentence and I'm saying this after having lived in the States and thus having learned a fair amount of the language. I can only imagine how someone with no knowledge of the language fared!

Finally we get to yet another glaring problem with this book. Namely the way it deals with women. I don't think that there is a single female character in the whole story for whom we don't know their sexual history, relevant or not. The vast majority of the women fall into either the 'whole' or 'virgin' categories and don't do much else besides, and even those that don't tend to be refrigerator women have their sexual status/history made known for stupid reasons. This is not something which happens with the male characters.
As if that wasn't enough, every time the author speaks of women, it is in a negative light. For instance, wives are described as "tiresome and sometimes boring" and nag men to "attend to details that he thought were unimportant" making them "often tempted to leave". Either that or they "were out for nothing but to marry the richest man they could find in order that they could live the idlest and most fatuous lives possible" while giving "their doting husbands as little congress as possible for their money, thus driving them into the arms of those women who were somewhat less chaste". So here not only has he essentially said that even the wives are whores, but it is their fault that their husbands cheat. Nice.

To finish off the list of failures of this book we have 2 more. The stupid title that is only relevant to one chapter of the book and was probably chosen to titillate and draw in readers, which is always the sign of a bad book because only those that can't stand on their own seek to mislead readers or use such cheap tricks. And the fact that the author couldn't seem to even chose a genre (or genres) to stick to. At times it tries to pass itself off as a comedy, fantasy (people and donkeys giving birth to leopards, really?!?), realism... and therefore fails to be any of them, leaving just a hopeless mix of lose ends and unsatisfying stories.

The only part that was even remotely enjoyable was the middle bit of the armed forces story arc where they set up and utilize a secret police/interrogation force. But even that devolved into a mess when the attempted humor and the author's inability to take anything serious threw it off track.

I I struggle to read this book it’s normally not my style of reading this book was chosen as a book to read for our Book Club and fortunately I just could not comprehend the story

As with Captain Corelli's Mandolin, the first half of the book is written from a huge cast of characters' different perspectives - telling their life stories and points of view, thrown in with several political explanations - and gathered together in the middle to finally create a recognisable storyline.

I'm not entirely sure how I read this whole book, as the first half I hardly knew what I was reading or who I was reading about, everything was so hard to follow. However, just when I was getting bored, everything somehow started to tie together and I found myself becoming interested in a few of the characters. I found the gurilleros particularly endearing.

I'm not usually inclined to read anything to politically focused, however I put up with it as it was quite enlightening to discover just how corrupt and violent South America can be (the army in any case). It was a learning experience and overall, I did enjoy most of reading this book.

Anyone who wishes to write fiction should read this book but prepared to be disappointed - in your own abilities in comparison with de Bernieres, who has swiftly become one of my favorite English writers. His style, plot, humor and candor make him irresistible, as does his subject matter, in this case, the impoverished campesinos of a mythical South American country. De Bernieres is like an English Marquez, crafting a land of magical realism with all the ugliness of the real world. De Bernieres' wide pallette of characters and archetypes comes to extraordinary life in this fine first novel, the beginning of a trilogy on the people of Chiriguana and, later, Cochadebajo de los Gatos. The novel is a roller-coaster ride of revolution, genocide, spiritual love, heresy and diaspora. If you're looking for a great book to enthrall you for a weekend at the beach or a few afternoons at the pool, look no further.

What can I say? This book is great. Louis de Bernieres really gets Latin America. I mean, any author can write about how tragic it is to live in a contemporary Latin American country (amid crushing poverty, constant unrest, military rule, etc). What de Bernieres recognizes is that everyday life in Latin America is also totally hilarious. This book empathizes with people in tragic circumstances by laughing at them. And, just as important, laughing with them and having them laugh at the reader. No one is spared the ridicule in this book. Which is good, because just like in the real third world, humor might be the only way to keep oneself afloat in this book's swelling tide of violence, sadness, and despair. Crap. That doesn't make it sound funny at all. But trust me: it is.

This book features a "plague of cats." Halfway through the story a whole bunch of cats show up and the characters go about business as usual surrounded by them — tripping over cats, petting them, moving them off furniture, having their shoelaces played with.

This feature could benefit many books! Dracula with cats, Lolita with cats, Moby Dick with cats...

De Bernieres' debut novel begins when Dona Constanza decides to divert the river to fill her swimming pool and by so doing sets in motion a series of events that lead to chaos in the villages of this unnamed South American country. There is a huge cast of characters - military, politicians, industrialists, peasants, Indians, guerrillas, spirits and animals. He also sprinkles in words or phrases in Spanish, Portuguese, and Indian dialects - and even a few that he makes up entirely. De Bernieres includes a fair amount of magical realism which may not appeal to everyone, but I love his writing.

This was quite possibly one of the most violent and strangest books I've ever read, and I've read a *lot* of strange and violent novels over the years. It was also one of the most fascinating, clever and enjoyable ones, too - impossible to put down. Loved the cats, General Fuerte, Aurelio was just wonderful, and the narrative was simply magical. I can't wait to get lost in the next one!