I couldn’t resist tapping into the early work of an author who flashed like a comet into my reading pleasure with his delightful and stirring “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” (1994) and “Birds Without Wings” (2004). While the former delved into a Greek island community invaded by Italians in World War 2. the latter rendered a portrait of a multicultural community in Anatolia shaken from death throes of the Ottoman empire and World War 1. Here our ensemble cast is from a village in some nameless South American country, spanning the range from peasants of native, black, or mixed races to wealthy immigrants, socialites, corporate oligarchs, and army members of various ranks. The former wends their way toward revolution against oppression and exploitation by the latter. Happily, there is some real character development and a fairy tale touch as folks of many walks of life end up working toward some utopian freedom by the end.

Some of the main characters include Don Emanuel , a wealthy landowner turning playboy and hippie, Dona Constanza Evans, the hauty but lusty wife of an oligarch, Aurelio, an orphan from ranching peons who gets empowered by a Native tribe in the rain forest, and Remedios, a female guerilla leader with a chip on her shoulder after sustaining the torture deaths of her parents as a girl. All these characters get nudged into changing their ways starting with an atrocity committed by one Sergeant Figueros, starting with an attempted rape of a beloved village girl and then escalating to a hand-grenade assault on a crowd. Rebel forces hiding in the mountains start gaining more forces, and they get bold enough to kidnap first Dona Constanza and then the general high in the government’s military command, General Fuertas. It turns out that Constanza likes the cut of one young rebel’s jib and that the general is sympathetic to the group’s despair over the corruption and brutality of soldiers like Figueros, which the general wasn’t aware of. The collective finds less brutal ways of fighting back against the government (poisonous spiders placed in tents, releasing caimen in the night, fake ghost hauntings) and grow their hope for autonomy somewhere remote from government reach.

This plot schema would not seem to not leave much opening for satire and humor. Much lies in the dialog among his well-crafted characters and its content of constant clashing between world views. The whole society is in a pathetic situation of suffering civil wars that have killed nearly 200,000 people, with little change in the situation of Liberal and Conservative politicians changing administrations every few years without touching the power of corrupt and greedy business leaders and their reins on the military. This picture seem close to the reality for many countries in South America.

The oligarchy was a large network of immensely rich landowners, descended from the conquistadors, who had been illiterate robber barbarians who had destroyed entire civilizations in the name of Jesus, the Virgin, the Catholic kings, and gold. In this way they ensured a perpetual sinecure in paradise for their immortal souls, and perpetual admiration from generations of schoolchildren who were taught in history lessons of their magnificent and daring exploits against the pagan savages whose phenomenal towns and monuments one can still see today (in ruins).

The absurd, but also realistic, element of this scenario involves the self-defeating factionalism among the socialists and communists and their inability to translate their affinity with the oppressed masses into coherent action:

The People’s Liberation Force was mainly a demolition group, whereas, for example, the People’s Vanguard was mainly an ambushing group, the People’s Liberation Front specialized in blackmail and extortion, and the Revolutionary Socialists in assassinating important people. The People’s Liberation Force probably chose its particular specialty because it was one of the safest; there is , after all, very little danger in planting bombs and then retreating to a safe distance. It apparently never perceived that you cannot alleviate the plight of the masses by destroying the infrastructure built up painfully slowly for their benefit on what little national wealth remained. But however paradoxical its behavior, what happened to the People’s Liberation Force was simply according to a general rule that applied to all humankind. The rule is that people always think that if they are very expert at something, that thing must be extremely important. The People’s Liberation Force was expert at explosives and therefore thought that what they did was crucial.

Some of the humor comes from a type of hyperbole that reminds me of Terry Pratchett in his Discworld series:
All this is history, but it does not do justice to the reality of the times in terms of the demonic wind of brutality and inhumanity that scoured the bodies and the souls of innocent and guilty alike.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ceded precedence to the Beast, the Mega Therion, which visited such inconceivable havoc upon the lives people that when it was finished, La Violencia had claimed over two hundred thousand of them. It is hard not to believe with hindsight that an infectious morbidity of the soul had contaminated the whole nation with an insanity of bloodlust thinly disguised at ideology and moral stance. There was a spreading sickness of ethical depravity that blew apart the eternal calm of the countryside and covered everything with a sticky slime of obscenity, viciousness, barbarity, and pointless cataclysm.

The insidious role of the Americans in supporting repressive puppet regimes favorable to social stability and business profits gets some zings in the tale. Their military training is extended to the secret police, which includes torture. As a result:
Brand-new methods of scalping, beheading, disemboweling, and quartering were improved and perfected by empirical experimentation and assiduous practice.

Don Emanuel, based on his past military experience, advises the rebel band that has adopted him and Dona Constanza:
It would be a mistake to kill Americans. …For one thing they are quite happy to throw their men away in futile causes. Secondly, they always believe they are in the right and that God is personally fighting for them, so they never give up. If you kill one gringo, they will send two in his place, and if you kill them, they will send over a fleet of helicopters. In any case it is better for you if you do not kill them, for they will do you a lot of good. …Although they are fanatical, they are mostly decent men. When they are present, our officers feel ashamed to commit atrocities. …No one understands their Spanish “so their advice is always misconstrued.” It helps to keep our army in chaos.

From the bits on de Bernieres in Wikipedia, it seems a stint as a young man from Sussex teaching English in Columbia stirred his imagination enough to compose his trilogy of the clashing and blending among Latin American cultures. That takes some chutzpa for an outsider. Like a blend of Vonnegut and John Irving, he walks the line between absurdism and sentimentality, with a comparable underlying playfulness. As much as de Bernieres acknowledges himself to be a “Márquez parasite”, he doesn’t really stray too much into magical realism. He calls the series “tragicomedies”. His hybridizing a tragic and dark realism with interludes of slapstick comedy strike me as closer to Shakespeare in form than Márquez. I ended up appreciating the author’s nice balance of warm-hearted treatment of his characters and jaundiced vision of South America, finding it both entertaining and inspiring. Mileage can vary among other readers, particularly given the range in people's tolerance of politically slanted satire.

I loved this book. Its one of the few book that I have read and enjoyed multiple times. The title suggests that I read this in Spanish - I did not - the English translation that I read was "Don Emmanuel's Netherparts". It is very much of the genre of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A lot of amazing events taking place in South America - the book encompasses so many fresh ideas - it is a heartbreaker and an empowerer. So much vivid imagery - some you'd love to live with and some you'd love to forget. Great novel.

This is a strange and wonderful book. Mr. de Bernieres has created a pastiche of South America, with an unnamed and imaginary country as his vehicle, and takes as his plot the struggles of one village and its inhabitants to survive in the brutal modern South American world. In parts historical, supernatural, political, racial, satirical,absurd, violent, sentimental--you name it, it's all here, and more--the book ranges over most of the South American experience. It's 100 Years of Solitude, but you can actually read and understand it. Mr. de Bernieres writes lyrically, and often floridly, but it's OK--floridly works with this story. Parts of the book are painful to read--he doesn't go easy on the corruption, senseless warfare and insurrection--and in fact the scenes of explicit random violence kept me from assigning a four star rating to the book. (Maybe I'm getting soft.)
This was the author's first book, I believe, and certainly shows the ability which later produced Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Birds Without Wings.

Having enjoyed Captain Corelli's Mandolin I picked up the box set of 3 of de'Berniere's earlier novels including this one - his first. To be honest I found it a bit boring. It took me half of the book to understand exactly what was going on and who was on who's side of the fight. This may have partly been due to the jumping around which goes on (as in Corelli's) but was not helped by the fact that the story didn't engage me. By the end I didn't really care what happened and half way through I contemplated giving up. It had it's plus sides - there were some hilariously sarcastic moments and a handful of the characters were likeable. I'll give the other two books in the set a chance but am not going to rush to read them yet. One sentence summary: A fight in Spain offers an insight into the corruption of the army and government.

Louis de Bernières needs a huge canvas, not for him a small space, so he creates a country, an imaginary country in Latin America...

A new Country would feel lonely... So he fills it with wondrous forests teeming with wild animals, with the jaguar the beloved of the Incas, humming birds of every colour, rivers full of fishes of every description...

Now this beautiful country continues to feel lonely and bereft and needs someone to admire its wondrous beauty, so he populates it with people...
The Country now has all versions of people, kind, corrupt, sly, poor, rich and violent and all those innumerable races and types, campesinos, native Indians and colonial landowners, left-wing revolutionaries and patriotic army careerists.
Of course all these types and these races have their own stories to tell, that’s what human life is all about, all through the World.

So from all these hundreds of people swarming this wondrous land, someone rich and bored like Dona Constanza finds that her swimming pool needs more water and so petulantly orders that a local river be diverted to fill her swimming pool...
The Campesinos resist and request another landowner, Don Emmanuel to help them out. Don Emmanuel’s argument is that if the river is diverted he would not be able to wash the 'dingleberries' out of his nether parts...
As expected, when there are so many types of people, one thing leads to another and the army is called in...
As expected, the peasants get mixed up with the local guerrillas...
Events can always escalate to a point of no return…
Then the peasants and the guerrillas decide to escape from the violence and sure death...
And there is an Exodus...

And then there are those people who stay in your mind forever, take General Fuerte...
Strangely in that mess of corruption, General Fuerte is one of those few who has not yielded to corruption. He believes in the Army and tries very hard to make sure his branch of the army performs honourably.
In the midst of his onerous tasks, he has a passion; his real passion is the taxonomy of animals.
When eventually everything gets too much for him, he deserts in order to follow his dream of recording the different species of hummingbirds found in the jungle.
Captured by the guerrillas, whose leader is a woman of great fortitude and who has her own stories to tell...
The guerrillas want to kill him for being in the army, but later realize how naïve he is and instead keep him as a prisoner for a very long time...

But it is Aurelio who breaks your heart, he a Mountain Indian who finds his way into the tribes in the jungle.
He and his wife cannot have children, so they raise dogs. When out in the jungle one day with their dogs they stumble upon a toddler, a feral girl.
They adopt her, she is their daughter and she is so beautiful, but beautiful girls most of the time have sad endings and tragedy strikes Parlanchina...

But life is never sad all of the time, there is a whole lot of fun too...
The country has a President married to a former stripper...
Prostitutes who take revenge on corrupt and violent Army Officers by infecting them with all sorts of venereal diseases...

This is not a mythical country in Latin America; this is the world we live in.
Only Louis de Bernières put it together for us!

This really combines most of my favourite devices and themes - Latin American magical realism, multiple narratives, social critique, etc. I am impressed by the quality and extent of de Bernières' voice as a European writing so convincingly from a different cultural perspective. I should not be so surprised, I absolutely loved Birds Without Wings, but given the continent and its writers hold a very special place in my heart, I was sceptical at first. The remainder of the trilogy has now made its way to my to read list...!

De Bernieres captures perfectly the pathos and insanity of the years of "the disappeared" in Argentina and Chile, in this magic realism portrait of an unnamed country in South America going through the military/political turmoil of the middle of the 20th century. The characters are ordinary people - mostly peasants from the countryside, but also the middle class, the military and police, and the spiritually-connected natives - trying to survive in an extraordinary time. Beautifully written and captivating.

This is on of absolute favourite books, and one which I return to time and time again. My mum had to buy me a new copy of this after she claimed that the original was in fact hers. At least I'm now the owner of a fresh copy rather than the one which has been dropped in the bath repeatedly over the years.

The first part of a trilogy set in South America, this is a magical read. If you're put off reading this because you didn't enjoy Captain Corelli's Mandolin, then don't be - its completely different and totally captivating.

The trilogy as a whole is ambitious in trying to create a complete world, filled with peasants and politicians, priests and magicians, but it succeeds. The overall effect is intense, fascinating, and more than a little bonkers.

I loved this book! It was so fun to read, the characters so colorful! I would love to see this made into a movie, but the book is wonderful because you'd never fit all of that into a couple hours. There are a thousand small stories here, deep little vignettes which make the book feel very layered, and each of them entertaining. It is set in the jungle and on the plains and in the mountains. The magic starts gradually, with the cats slowly becoming larger than normal cats, all the way to--- well, I can't give that away, but it is fun as hell and very satisfying. This is a story about dingleberries. This is a book about wars and revolutions, religion, alchemy, farming, tricks and politics. So of course there are lots of dead bodies, torture, rape, human trafficking and economics. But there are heroic men and women, who are also human and superhuman/magical in the end. There is love and sex, and families and zombies to help build the new city Cochadebajo de los Gatos. The ending is satisfying and also the beginning of more stories I hope to read soon.

Excellent satirical romp with many engaging characters - will definitely read more from this author!

The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts – Louis De Bernieres
4 stars

“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. “ Louis De Bernieres – The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts


I’m reading Bernieres backward. I started with Birds Without Wings and I’ve been working my way backward through his publication history. This book (which must be a contender for “Best Title of the 20th century”) was published in 1990. It was a very ambitious first novel. In an author’s note, Bernieres states that he has created an imaginary Latin American country with history, topography and language jumbled up from various sources. There are nearly 40 characters whose lives intersect in a story that includes guerilla war, military corruption, paranormal intervention, brutality, passion, outrageous humor and biting satire.

A book this complex should be read with great attention. The need for attention to detail is not immediately apparent. Characters and situations are introduced in short, well-constructed passages that seem only loosely connected. At the beginning it is easy to read briefly about one character, put the book down and come back to it much later. I did this several times, but I lost out on the connections and found that I had difficulty with pivotal events when I could not remember each character’s significance. The book improved when I sat down to read for longer periods of time. I was able to grasp the intricate web of intertwined lives that Bernieres was building.

I was mildly disappointed that Don Emmanuel’s nether parts play a very minor role in the story. In a very round about way, it is essentially the story of an impoverished, insignificant village and its hilariously devious victory over the corrupt and brutal military establishment. It is a temporary victory. I found the surreal salvation of the village to be the weakest part of the story. The best parts concern individual characters who are drawn realistically, but with great affection and humor. As in his later books, Bernieres has an underlying social agenda. He touches on the implications of United States covert military intervention, drug trafficking, the Falklands Island conflict, and international pressure concerning ‘Los Deseparecidos”.

There are a great many similarities between this book and the later Birds Without Wings. It even begins with the death of a bird, in this case, a vulture. The later book is stronger and I’ve tried to define why I think so. The biggest difference is the use of first person narrative. Bernieres allowed the many characters of Eskibahce to speak for themselves. The characters in Don Emmanuel’s fictional country did not speak up in their own voices. They are wonderful characters, but they stayed in the book and did not come alive for me in the same way.

I've read it 3 times - that should tell you! And I think it is better than Corelli's Mandolin (the book - I never saw the movie).