I LOVE this book- it's one of my favourite ever- the whole trilogy really

A good ending but not the best book in my favourite trilogy

??????????There aren't many books that I give up on, but by the 6th or 7th chapter, I had absolutely no clue as to what was going on, who everyone was or why I should be careing enough about them to carry on reading! As life is too short to waste on bad books, I decided to go onto something else I might enjoy more.

Bailed after 150 pages. I just couldn't get into this one. It's written as a series of silly episodes, and no one episode was particularly interesting. Maybe it's one I'll return to in the future --- it isn't poorly written, but it wasn't pulling me in either.

The beautiful finale to Louis De Bernieres' Latin American trilogy. I am lost for words. How charmingly and wittingly written this book was, for a book which is fundmanentally about the horrors of rape, war, genocide and religious corruption. I laughed out loud several times and teared up slightly at the end... this entire trilogy has drawn my soul out of my body but in a good way and I am glad to say that these books have made me a better and happier person. Vive La Cochadebajo de los Gatos!!!


I'll leave anyone who actually read this review with a quote that I consider quite fitting...
"Maybe one day it will be an ancient story. Every story has to begin somewhere."

3.5*** (rounded up for use of language)

The third and final installment in this author’s “Latin American Trilogy” returns to the village of Cochadebajo, in the mountains of an unnamed South American country (presumably Columbia). Many of the characters from earlier novels reappear, including Dionisio Vivo, the General, the President, various rebels, and the giant panthers. De Bernières also gives us a demented Cardinal and his horde of fanatical followers, bent on destroying those who refuse to adhere to their version of the faith.

I love these books. I love his clever writing and vivid imagery, the outlandish plot points, and outrageous scenarios. While I am not a great fan of satire, I enjoy this kind of novel which satirizes and skewers political and religious fervor run amok. There are passages that had me laughing aloud, and others that completely horrified me.

The reader who can suspend disbelief and tolerate a great deal of magical occurrences will be delighted. However, I definitely recommend you begin with the first book in the trilogy: The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts

OK

Very Marquezian.

Has anyone seen the beast? Has anyone seen the beast? called the three-hundred-year-old-man, as he cantered over the drawbridge upon his rachitic horse. "Has anyone seen the beast whose stomach rumbles like a pack of dogs, taking many shapes, and devastating the land? Has anyone seen the beast?

A spectre from the past  easily identified as the immortal knight of Miguel de Cervantes , like an oracle of doom, announces troubled times for Cochadebajo de los Gatos, the mountain refuge that is sheltering most of the characters from the first two novels of Louis de Bernieres' South American trilogy. The villagers have fought against the rogue army forces of the republic in the first book, they have opposed the drug lords in the second book. Who else is casting an envious eye at the happines they have carved for themselves out of the rocky slopes of the Andes?

The title suggest that the problems might be related to Cardinal Dominic Trujillo Guzman, the leader of the Catholic Church in the capital. After civil wars and drug wars, the trilogy tackles now religious war. The offspring of the Cardinal is a multi-layered metaphor: it stands for the natural son he fathered on a servant in his palace; for his renegade brother who roams the countryside reciting ancient scatological poetry in Latin; for the nightmares that haunt the cardinal's waking hours with visions of devils and Hell; for the medical canker that is actually consuming him from the inside out; most of all it stand for his pet project of bringing his unruly flock back into the fold of the Church, sending priests into the countryside to combat heresy and to preach the true word of the gospel.

I am forcibly obliged to reflect upon how it is that those of us who are connected directly with God and are enamoured of reason and law can deduce with such clarity propositions whose practical application can lead to such lamentable consequences.

The words in the quote above belong to Thomas d'Aquino, the practical philosopher who organized and explained the tenets of the Catholic Church. He is one of the supernatural actors who are mixed by Bernieres into his narrative. Among d'Aquino's offspring, the most (in)famous is the Inquisition. His teachings might have been honest and well argumented, but their practical application resulted in some of the worst crimes perpetrated by man against man. When an accolite of Cardinal Guzman is put in charge of the spiritual revival project, the result is a murderous crusade against the villagers in their path.

I had seen a vision of Hell, such as each generation sees it. My parents saw just these things during La Violencia, and their parents saw just these things during the civil war. It was the same play with new actors, and I asked the same question as my parents: "What is wrong with us that we shit on paradise?"

Louis de Bernieres is consistent over the three books of this South American trilogy, driving his point by juxtaposing Hell and Heaven. Hell is the establishment: the power hungry military, the corrupt politicians, the cruel drug lords, the mega-corporations laying waste to the natural resources, poverty, dogma, violence. Armed with the arrows of satire, the authors makes clowns of the bad guys, but I couldn't really laugh at the descriptions of young girls forced into prostitution, of children dying of hunger, of indiscriminate killing and constant terror imposed by armed thugs. These are still prominent features of the South American continent: islands of opulent wealth surrounded by rundown favellas, wealth and power pretending their poor neighbors are invisible and somehow guilty for their own misfortune. They are called 'los olvidados', the forgotten ones. Cardinal Guzman would like to see them all gone.

It is true that they are uneducated and their morals are frequently deplorable, Your Eminence, but they are masters of improvisation. Every time it rains their cardboard shacks are washed away, and twenty-four hours later they are built again. They make delicate stews from rats and sandal-leather, they live by swarming over the garbage tips raking them over for scraps, and in this way they are akin to Lazarus, Your Eminence. They suffer typhoid and cholera, and yet they hold the best carnivals in the capital.

A never-ending carnival is what the author builds by contrast in Cochadebajo de los Gatos, out of the simple pleasures of living and of sharing in the meagre resources at their disposal, of working hard together and afterwards singing and dancing and fornicating to their hearts' desire. It's an Utopian society, that can only be created by bringing magic into the storyline, but like other Utopias before it, it simply points the way to a better society, and is not describing an existing one. Like a magnet, the little village in the mountain attracts the misfits and the wanderers of the land, the oppressed and the desperate souls in need of a salvation that the church is unable to provide. Among them a Mexican musician who has a little problem with a girl that keeps visiting him  he falls in love with twins, and marries both

It was an ideal place for me, because I wanted fresh mountain air, space, privacy, a place where one could palpably feel the presence of ancient gods and the spirits of nature. But also it was a place where, when in the appropriate mood, one could find spectacular revelry and good humour.

My favorite episode of life in the village is hard to pick among several funny anecdotes, but I am tempted to mention here the 'Battle of Dona Barbara', a case of troubles in paradise that also arose out of the good intention of providing the locals with reading material. Don Dionisio Vivo, slayer of drug barons, uses his contacts in the valley to start a local library, but his friends there persuade him to buy all the unsold copies of a romance novel. The project is an instant succes:

The habit of literacy being unconsolidated, the hush lasted for an entire week whilst brows furrowed and lips silently repeated the text. Work stopped, or those working would cut alfalfa with the book in the left hand whilst the machete in the right swept aimlessly over the same spot. People read walking down the street, treading on the jaguars' tails and tripping over the kerbs, bumping into each other and forgetting to go and eat what their spouses had failed to cook because it had burned unstirred in its pot.

As many Goodreaders know, one is not only a reader, one is also a critic. Luckily for me, I am expressing my opinions online, carefully insulated from more robust counterarguments from fans of the novels I occasionally thrash. In Cochadebajo de los Gatos, the critics are all living together and so will soon come to blows over the merits of the plucky heroine or of the dastardly seducer:

From this episode Dionisio deduced that the principle reason for religious schisms was that everybody derives their information from the same book.


Nominally Catholic, the inhabitants of the village are in practice polytheistic, grafting the saints and angels of Christianity onto the more robust branch of the West African pantheon the slaves brought with them in their forced crossing of the ocean. The result is called 'santeria', a system similar to voodoo, that absorbs and accepts a lot of different opinions and beliefs, fluid and unruly in its manifestations, with the celebrations coming closer to drunken orgies than to the singing of holy hymns. It is the kind of heresy that Cardinal Guzman and his dogs of war would like to eradicate. The scene is set for an epic confrontation of the two sets of beliefs, a confrontation that I will not spoil for the future readers. I would leave only one short quote that I consider the most important lesson I found in the novel:

It seems to me that tolerance only ever prospers where people have grown weary of bogus certainties.

---

I have started writing reviews here on Goodreads mostly for my own use, knowing I have a poor memory for details, and that after a time the plots and the names of characters from different novels will start to get mixed in my head. I am thinking now, what I would like most of all to remember from the three South American books? My answer for the moment is that I would very much like to live for one year among the people of Cochadebajo de los Gatos, sharing in their revelries, helping them with the crops, strolling around with the magical black jaguars, eating the dangerous "Chicken of a True Man" at Dona Flor's restaurant, listening to their outrageous stories by the campfires.

Once there was a woman worm who met her friend under the floor of my hut, and I heard them talking. One said to the other, "where is your husband?" and the other replied, "He has gone fishing."

Thank you for the good times: Pedro the Hunter, with his pack of silent dogs and his clothes made of animal skins; Father Garcia, with his gentle conscience, his wild metaphysical ideas, and his appearance of a depressed hare; Misael, with his honest black face and his love of revelry; Remedios, with her Kalashnikov and her gift of military acumen; Josef, with his ability to find compromises that accommodated everybody's plans; Hectoro, who had three wives, never dismounted from his horse except to drink or make love, and looked every inch a conquistador; Consuelo and Dolores, the two whores who reminded the men that they were not gods on account of the possession of testicles; Aurelio, the Aymara Indian who crossed the veils between this and the other worlds and seemed to be in every place at the same time; and General Fuerte, who had deserted the army by faking his own death; Profesor Luis and Farides, Dionisio Vivo and his harem, Don Emmanuel and his Felicidad, and all the other friends I made here. I promise you I will try to come and visit you in your mountain fastness.

Wraps up the trilogy satisfactorily. I know, my reviews suck, but it's hard to explain these books--you just have to read them!

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” Rumi

“It is given to no human being
to stereotype a set of truths,
and walk safely in their guidance
with his mind closed.”
John Stuart Mill

Knowledgeable about, maybe comfortable with, history’s brutality, and armed with coruscating wit and perfectly timed irony - apparently collected, and carefully curated, from everywhere - twinned with the understanding of the damage done by believing anything to be absolute, especially when acted upon by the venial and greedy, de Bernieres has written a timeless tale with delicious magical realism and real human terror.

“There has been much argument among historiosophists as to what conditions must pertain in order for history to occur….
Surely, the historians feel, mankind had reached a stage when almost everyone recognized that no belief was so certain that it was worth killing for...
Such historians are possibly out of touch with reality, being insufficiently cynical about people’s motives…”

Classic characters including Thomas Aquinas (who returns totally aghast at, and unable to make penance for, all the human suffering and cruelty his writings resulted in) find themselves in a modern day Inquisition. A crusade with the moniker "The New Albigensian Campaign" in honor of St. Dominic, who Thomas Aquinas tells us, "has never been seen in paradise."

An elderly woman about to suffer a terrible demise, sums up the Church:
“Despite her rheumy vision she perceived in them a revolting self-righteousness, an appalling collection of unexamined certainties, a terrible spiritual hubris masquerading as gentle humility, and she was utterly repelled.”

At one point Thomas Aquinas, trying to change what is happening in his name, notes:
“I have seen the intellectually modest informed that doubt is sinful, and summarily dispatched, and I have longed for the humanism of the ancients who declared that in philosophy all things are doubtful and open to question….and I have heard it laid down as law that writers, doctors, clerks, and itinerant artists are all heretics by nature and inclination, and the doctors are killed and the heretics told that medical treatment is forbidden them.”

And I think. “Doubt is sinful”. This is doctrine in the Mormon Church where missionaries are told “when the church authorities speak, the thinking has been done” and being called an “intellectual” is an insult. Really. True.

The author creates a brilliant metaphor when the Cardinal who sets the violence in motion - somewhat unwittingly - and is constantly tortured by demons who, among other things while mocking him, write “in the air with fire the names of all his sins”
is found to have a rare, but real, medical condition. Dreaming about its contents, done by the doctor who diagnoses him, is truly some of the most hilarious writing I’ve ever enjoyed.

Other sweet bits (from random pages):

About an one-hundred-meters race:
“No one else had been practicing, because it was considered that a real man could triumph without so wasting his time and energy; there was also a general feeling that training was a form of cheating.”

“I have made the acquaintance of the British ambassador…..He is a great linguist, you know; he speaks Hindi and four African languages, and so they sent him here where he cannot use any of them. Very British, I understand, to do that.”
t(As putting a dog-breeder in charge of the coronavirus response is Very like the USA)

Because of the necessity for unanimity in every decision among a group of radical priests that initially participated in the crusade, and:
“Additionally, like all people who enjoy addressing each other as “comrade”, they were violently addicted to clauses, composites, subclauses, points of order, wording of paragraphs, procedural formalities, and amendments of amendments.”
- it took too long for them to decide what to say or do, for them to take any relevant action. Or change the outcome of anything.
Ah, the Left.

An epic, the end of de Bernieres trilogy set in an unnamed South American country, and about those
“...souls he shrouded in stone so that the ice of fanaticism froze out the light of reason and the exhilarating wisdom of conjecture. In this way was the modesty of speculation replaced by the iron cage of certainty.”

versus those who can feel they
“... had been purified by [their] complete lapse of dignity…”

May there be a future of content bewilderment, exhilarating conjecture, and purifying lapses of dignity.

Magical realism is one of my favorite genres and this novel did not disappoint.