I feel inherently bad whenever I decide to rate a book with such a dismal rating as “1 Star.” Yes, I am fully aware that my opinionated “1” means diddlysquat in the totality of things; that I am just a minuscule reader, one of millions, and my less than stellar rating is predictable should a publisher or an author apply even the most rudimentary standards of the law of averages. Yet even so, there is a dread and a hollowness that comes when I find myself decisively clicking “1” as a measure of the quality of a bygone reading experience.

I guess I feel this numbness at being so potentially hypercritical because I know that a book is a creation of a different bent. A book isn’t made with the same casualness as tossing together an uninspired and soggy Cesar salad. A book also isn’t a machinated amalgamation, the sum total of spokes and wheels and levers coming together to produce a bounded copy with words spawned by an errant thoughtlessness.

No. A book holds life-force. A book is breathed into being with the sweat and toil and trepidation of another living soul. Someone lost sleep typing its pages. Someone ran late to Bat Mitzvahs and retirement parties just so they could capture that evanescent and fleeting image before it receded into the back of their cluttered mind. Someone practiced months, if not years, of abnegation, denying themselves simple charms and pleasures just to give life to the inkling of a tale that was dancing around the edges of their brain. Someone was bold enough to forego inhibition and to present their work and their baby to the world to be received or rejected. At the end of the day, a book is but a simulacrum of the will and determination of a human soul, and to give it a “1” feels like I am spitting on someone’s magnum opus.

See, when I read a book I am aware that I am gazing into the innermost life of someone. Sure, they may gloss over things with inexplicable events or unbelievable characters, but I know that somewhere in those pages lies hints at the foundation of beliefs that said author ascribes to. A book is revelatory, in ways that a picture can never be.

Therefore, the decision to rate The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts a “1” was both a heady and a weighty one. It was a little easier to make given that I seem to be the anomaly, and most have developed fond and positive feelings toward this book, but nevertheless, it was still a rating that I subconsciously wanted to withhold.

So, what went wrong? To start, there was too much farce and not enough substance. This novel tells the tale of a fictitious internecine war between politicos in an unnamed South American country. Guerrillas vs. Communists. Liberals vs. Maoists. Government vs. Military. And a number of other interlocking combinations of battles that would give Fibonacci’s Number a run for its money. Quite frankly, the cause or reason for the war was hard to understand, which I believe was by author’s intent. This was designed to be satirical, with De Bernieres making a statement of how the wars of men are fought over the most paltry and indeterminable things. However, the tone throughout this “war” was perhaps too light. Rape and murder and torture and coups and landmines and decimation of entire villages was presented with a humor laced nonchalance that made them feel like nonevents. I felt nonplussed by almost every horror, not because I am a sadist, but because these grotesqueries were happening with such a brevity and rapidity that it left me unmoved.

But perhaps even more damning was the fact that the characters in this book were flat and underdeveloped. The characters felt like nothing more than a motley crew of screw-ups with cereal box backstories, which meant that their successes and failures inspired little empathy or emotion. And because this book was structured with shifting POV’s, those few characters who were interesting and redeemable were given such little face time that they too began to feel like scenery to a jumble of a tale. Even Don Emmanuel, the book’s namesake, was an afterthought of a character whose eponymous placement in the book’s title seems to be the most whimsical and capricious of mysteries.

I came into this book with high expectations. I was expecting a book that was sultry, magical, well-written, and tempered with a balanced humor. Instead I only received glimpses of beautiful writing that was lost in a fog of excessive extremes in terms of comedy and fancy.

I expected this book to be a doppelganger of an Isabel Allende or a Gabriel Garcia Marquez work, but its lack of deftness and restraint and to be quite frank again, realism, made this book a hard one for me to enjoy. I don’t think I have ever finished and closed a book with such a marathon runner’s weariness, glad to have crossed the finish line and to be able to move on to something else.

This was the book the boys of that ill fated 11th grade English class should have read instead of 100 Years of Solitude. Class discussion would have been identical (maybe even stimulating, with that 7% minority faction, literally being on the wrong page), but looking back, less profoundly traumatizing.

Perilously scabbarded tongue, in cheek, critique of post war colonial (sic) American policy in its southern neighbours. A long tragic sigh of inevitability at the terrible things humans do to one another, with a cosmic sense of humour in coincidence afforded by being fiction.

This is the type of book I really relish: Epic, with myriad POVs &, therefore, too, a plethora of characters: satirical, tragicomic. How can somebody possibly populate this South American Question Mark of a Town? de Bernieres is on the same line as Tolkien and John Kennedy Toole-- his characters are fleshy and complicated. The war is fought at many angles and everybody has a part to play.

Don Emmanuel makes a "Queen-Elizabeth-in-"Shakespeare in Love""-like cameo (Dame Judy Dench... in all her splendor), & yet his name is bestowed upon the title; not Remedios, the Guevaraesque woman, the main revolutionary, nor her fellow guerillas (all of which are underdogs and Suffer, yet constantly fight for freedom as in all the best of narratives). It is not "Dona Costanza's Sexual Awakening". It is not "Holocaust in the Tropics". It has a silly, quirky title, and it is exactly this: a silly, quirky novel. It is also relevant, it is bittersweet, it is complex. It is more than one thinks it is. It would fit perfectly with "Slumdog"... dead serious, yet heartfelt to the nth degree (the atrocious rapes and killings are dispersed among vignettes of intense happiness and the unification of native peoples).

There is also the clever prose, the important pseudo-irrelevancies, the constant flights of fancy. De Bernieres obviously has much fun inventing.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is serious and poignant; this more modern storyteller has a larger sense of humor and takes a less direct approach with symbolism; the population of the little besieged town is all of a sudden plagued with cats: the townspeople care about them and integrate them into their rural lives. The cats then become panthers... though there is an obvious exodus, there is, too, a return to a mother land. Oh yes- & according to the Santa figure that is the jolly Don Emmanuel, a cure for the war is... yes, sex. How more simple can it get in its complexity?

50 stránek mi trvalo 20 dní, je to šíleně nečtivé a těžkopádné. Celé je to psané jak hádanka a každá druhá věta je úplně o ničem jiném. Prcat

I'm not much of a reader of novels. i tend to prefer non-fiction. But I went though a phase of quite enjoying magical realist ones by this guy and Garcia-Marquez. I think I read about four before ultimately reminding myself that it's all just a bunch of stuff that some writer made up, and while reading them is a nice way to pass the time, they don't significantly increase my understanding of the world around me, although they do a bit.

I know I'll be shot down for saying that, but there you go.

Mám rád příběhy z Jižní Ameriky, líbí se mi magický realismus (když se to umí) a sedí mi tenhle styl humoru. Co můžu dělat jiného, než dát maximum?
Nikdy bych nehádal, že autor je Angličan, nepřijde mi to o nic míň "jihoamerické" než třeba Dům duchů nebo Sto roků samoty. A o nic horší.
Najdete tu všechno - diktátory i partyzány, generály i pralesní indiány, tajnou policii i magické kočky. A přitom je to psané tak lehce a s humorem, že si ani neuvědomujete, že některé pasáže jsou jako z Nabarveného ptáčete. Utrpení a smrt se míchá s magií, s nadějí a láskou i s humorem a absurditou a výsledek je výborná mixtura, navíc perfektně přeložená. Vivat Janiš :)
Těším se na další dva díly a rozhodně půjdu i do dalších Bernièresových knih. A samozřejmě doporučuji.

A rambling tale about a fictitious South American republic ravaged by army coups, revolutionary guerrillas, and massive corruption in public life. Louis de Bernieres paints a detailed and entertaining picture of life in this country and the goings on between the army and the guerillas, with the locals trapped in between. De Bernieres has a great eye for the ironic and his writing style is very humorous, which makes the first 100 pages or so very entertaining. But then I want to see the plot developing so I can get engaged, the novel just continues to ramble. Endless characters from every walk of life. Sorry, but I just don't want to spend hours on this. Life's too short for a pensioner like me.

4.5 stars

This book made me want to listen to vallenatos for a week straight, while furiously googling if it's safe, for a relatively healthy, kind of middle-aged young woman, who does not know how to drive, to solo travel to Colombia.

That aside, I think it's important to remember that Gabriel García Marquéz this is not. Once you're past that consideration, you will find a lot of heartbreak, hilarity and eeky moments in (respectably) equal amounts. A lot of the negative reviews here complain that we didn't really get to care about any of the characters, because too many were introduced at the same time - pish posh. There's two more books in the series, and if you don't care at least about the original villagers by the end of this one, you read it too fast.

One criticism I have, is that there was absolutely no reason, none whatsoever, to use the word 'micturition' instead of 'urination' as many times as the author did. Which speaks to the fact that the language he uses is very often exceedingly ornamental - which at times played into the comedy, but at other points, was just a bother.

Love de Bernieres writing style and witty, cathartic tales. Loved Captain Corelli's but only like this one. Story focuses on a mixed bag of people in an immaginary south American country - like Corelli's it was a great way to learn about another culture that I have no background in. I loved having the politics that drove the military men, guerillas, civilians explained. As usual with de Bernieres, it is all part of the story, not a lecture. Might read next in series...
As for magical realism - can't say I love it since I hate Love in the Time of Cholera. I am getting used to the genre.

Reading this story was like reading one of those odd dreams you have. I always seem to get so much enjoyment out of magical realism, a genre I never thought I could ever even begin to patronize, or take seriously. But it never disappoints..The only reason I'm giving it only 3 stars is because there was a lot of political party, army, general, soldiers, and stuff like that, which always loses me, but I loved it when I would read about Aurelio, his wife and daughter. I also had a hard time keeping up with the characters, no fault to the book, I was distracted at the time, having to study for tests, etc. But the book was brilliantly written, and i would definitely read the other two that follow.

This book, along with the other two in the series (Senor Vivo and the Coca Lords and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman) are what I like to call my 'sick books' - they're the books that I always read when I'm home sick from work - they're always entertaining, but since I've read them so many times, I don't have to strain my ill brain trying to follow them. Probably I've read these three books more than any others for that very reason.

This one in particular is actually not the first one I read - big mistake! Read them in order. Some of the stuff that gets set up in this one doesn't really get followed up in the other two (like the romance between Remedios and the Conde Pompeyo Xavier Extremador, which gets one chapter shoe-horned into the the 3rd book). And I can certainly understand how some people might take issue with his portrayal of women - there are an awful lot of whores in these stories, after all. But still, I love them and would recommend them to anyone.