I would have given this book four stars had it not been for a couple of horrific chapters which made me so sick I scanned the rest. Otherwise, an enjoyable read. Given this is set in an imaginary South American country it really brought home the struggle against the coca cartels with an interesting story and prose.

after believing that The War of Don Emanuel's Nether Parts was (is) a perfect novel - well balanced (joy, pain, personal development...) i was really looking forward to the next book in the trilogy -
however this was NOT balanced - too long developing the romance (lovely touching, fresh, wonderful) --too long because early on you know it is doomed. brief revenge for the violence does NOT balance the novel's sadness.
well one of his books finally got less than 5 stars (from me).

Utterly engrossing--this is like if Garcia Marquez got off his high horse and lessened his stern seriousness and had some frickin' fun. Carnavalesque, the central love story is embedded like a beautiful diamond in this multi-chaptered saga of magical realism and extra bittersweet poignancy. I loved this revisit to Louis de Bernieres' vivid terrain--the inclusion of Dionosio (Dios--> God?) Vivo to the cast of characters that includes Remedios the Revolutionary and Don Emmanuel is an assurance that the last episode in the trilogy will be powerful. Can't wait to read it.

I must say that I was taken entirely by surprise by the amount of dead characters... de Bernieres takes you there, and then he makes you grieve. He's an extraordinary artist that balances comedy and tragedy so SOOO well that you're given small time to take it all in. This is a brisk walk through the jungle, then a run. Also, one of the best romances ever committed to the page!

Also, I must add that the last chapter, written in the POV of a fellow reporter is truly ironic, beautiful, a brushstroke of storytelling genius! How can an artist decide to leave his own conventions for the most important part-- for the most jarring impact to the gut? Not only is the author creative and intelligent, this guy has intuition and, yes, (perhaps most important of all:) a sense of humor.

This one is the best in the Latin American trilogy. His "Empire Strikes Back."

This book captures you. It is dark and light. It plummets you into horrendous scenes and equally swings you into unimaginable delight.

Hard to summarise - went from amusingly eccentric for the first half to sickeningly and graphically violent in latter chapters. Nicely written but maybe a little too incohesive for my taste - 3.5 stars

de Bernieres two books, "Corelli's Mandolin" and "Birds without Wings," list among my top five books ever. As such, I was delighted discover a new book by him (new to me), "Senor Vivo and the Coco Lord." de Bernieres is such a fabulous writer, with typically rich plots, deep characters, and all sorts of literary panache, that I think I would like most anything he had written. As such, I liked Senor Vivo. The descriptions were as delightful as I expected, and the plot dealt with weighty issues. However, I'm just not a fan of mystical realism, and even de Bernieres could only push me so far into appreciation. The minimalist characterization and very limited plot arc left me wanting. Fortunately, this is among his early books, so perhaps whatever he writes next will reach the levels of mastery achieved in his later two books.

much more violence than the other two books in the trilogy, and the graphicness can be disconcerting, but I see it as serving to remind us how horrible things can be. In spite of that, it retains most of the magical realism charm of the other books.

3.5 rounded up. For so,e reason, this took me significantly longer to get through than The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, which I LOVED. This is very good as well.

First let me say that I was ever so glad to have read the first in the trilogy before this one. I truly don't know what the 1001 books people were thinking putting this on the list without the other. I cannot imagine getting much out of this without The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts. To add to that, Don Emmanuel was a better read for me. There are many references to Cochadebaja de los Gatos and, in fact, some of the action takes place there. How would anyone know the significance of that without reading the first in the series? This does provide minimal back story, but it is simply not enough.

The reason I didn't like this as much is the story itself. The title would lead one to believe it is the same sort of frivolous absurdity as in Don Emmanuel. At least I was so fooled. This is much darker. So dark, in fact, that 50+ pages from the end are several paragraphs of graphic and sadistic violence. The book opens with a body in Dionisius Vivo's front yard, so perhaps one could have expected the later depiction. After all, the other person in the title is a drug lord. This later incident is horrific. There is also a lot more explicit sex. Or at least I think there was a lot more - could I have simply not noticed in a book whose title includes the words "nether parts"?

Despite that, I do hope to get to the third in the series, The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman. I like the setting of the fictitious South American country. With exceptions noted above, I like the characters so far. I like that, for the most part, the stories range between quirky and absurd. The prose continues to be varied and interesting. All in all, what I like in a book, and I'm sorry that this one, due to the violence, barely rises to the 3-star mark.

I loved Berniers's writing style - he writes the way I tell stories! He's hilarious, but at the same time inserts a subtle yet important message for us to think about.

This is a read for adults only, set in South America in a small nation being dominated by the drug gangsters. The author was born in UK but lectured in South America for a few years, after which he wrote his books.

Don Vivo is a lecturer who writes erudite letters to his local paper about how the coca trade is destroying the nation. For instance, the balance of trade is badly affected, because of every ten millon dollars of gain from selling coca, the drug lords lodge nine in a Swiss bank account and spend the rest on imported luxury goods. The police are few and poorly paid, also prone to being threatened by heavily armed drug gangs. Naturally many of them take bribes. And people paid with pesos to be labour, are then paid with coca derivatives and become slaves, quickly dying, while the women and children are abducted and raped. From his small but cosy home Don Vivo asks - twice - why it is that Spanish people who used to adore and respect nubile young women have turned to hating women.

While the professor builds a following his sweetheart becomes more in love with him and more concerned about his safety. Don Vivo has a staunch and incorruptible friend in the police force, to whom he reports the frequent dumping of mutilated bodies on his lawn. The tale does not get easier to read and there are scenes which show absolute depravity. The author must have either found it difficult to write some of them, or dissociated somehow. Don Vivo's reactions show the reactions of a normal, right minded person. I only wished he had got moving sooner because good lives would have been spared. However the tale is a salutary lesson in why it is important to fight the horrible drugs trade and by the end we see signs of progress. The moral is, buy coffee not coca.

We also get a look at the many forms of worship practised simultaneously, by the same people, a different belief for a different occasion. Various cultures have different cures and festivals which are carried on, which slow down the tale at times but form a rich cultural backdrop. We also find the book alive with animals and plants in the verdant mountainous, jungly, coastal scenery. The author is packing in all his experiences and observations, so amid the casual brutality of a gold refining camp we find a leper, and in a village considered to be underwater by the maps we find semi-domesticated black jaguars.

There are touches of magical realism, in that a man is early told his daughter is a cat, or a person on the street is believed to have spent four hundred years dead under an avalanche before being revived, but these peter out in the full glare of the semi-miraculous, sometimes amusing escapes of Don Vivo from the gangsters, who, being peasants, become ever more superstitious. The book is not an easy read, but full of detail and determination.

Chutovka. Krutost nejde pod kozu (nastastie), pretoze je popisana akoby len nahodou. Magicky realizmus je tiez akoby len nahodnou sucastou knihy. Uplna parada je cesky preklad, v ktorom je ponechanych mnozstvo spanielskych vyrazov (kto nevie po spanielsky, musi asi viacej listovat do slovnika vzadu v knihe) a aj samotne ceske slovicka dodali knihe skvelu atmosferu. A stale som mala pocit, ze sa dej odohrava v 19. storoci, taku to malo atmosferu, hoc to bol dej z 90. rokov 20. storocia.