Why i even bothered to pick this book up. Really not my type

Long before he became a martyred revolutionary icon made to order for hipster T-shirts, Ernesto "Che" Guevara was a goofy and even funny middle class kid from Argentina. While in his early twenties, he talked his fellow med student Alberto Granado into a trip across South America. How? Why, on Alberto's rickety Norton 500 motorcycle, nicknamed La Poderosa II ("The Mighty One II"). This book is the story of their journey, lasting approximately until he and Alberto split up in Venezuela, where the latter found work.

In the meantime, La Poderosa managed to make it over the Andes (with considerable help) into Chile, where it gave up the ghost miles south of Santiago. From then on, the two were dependent on hitching rides, and even stowing away aboard a ship to Antofagasta. But they are caught and forced to work for their keep and play cards with their captain, who never seemed to sleep.

The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey is actually a fun book to read. One could begin to see Guevara's sympathies for the downtrodden indigenous people in Peru, where there is considerable tension between the Aymara and the ladinos, the Mestizos who are intent on treating them like dirt. Eventually, after many a diversion, they make it to the San Pablo Leper Colony near Iquitos, where they spend some time before continuing north. Both Granado and Guevara had been interested in leprosy and made friends by their treatment of the patients as fellow human beings.

The book ends with a speech made years later in Castro's Cuba entitled "A Child of My Environment," which, thankfully, is abridged for this edition. I liked Guevara a whole lot more when he was describing suffering from one asthma attack after the other while trying to find free food, accommodation, and transportation in Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. In the end, the two med students were like hoboes -- but it is interesting that they frequently found the help they so desperately needed.

Except for the speech at the end, the book is virtually devoid of any political content. In fact, Che seems to come across at the time as a supported of the Argentine dictator Juan Peron and his wife Evita -- though those scenes may have been only to make conversation with curious Peruvians.

Disclaimer: This review is for the first 1/4th of the book; I never finished it.

Being a motorcycle fanatic, I had high hopes from this book but I was left disappointed. I pushed myself many times to finish this book but it didn't work too well; I never finished the book.

The reason this book left bitter taste is due to extremely boring story within first few chapters. Throughout the first few chapters, both of the bikers fall down, get up, fix the bike, find shelter, get something to eat, sleep, wake up at some strangers place, rinse and repeat the whole cycle. It was interesting to relive the experience but when the same thing happens again and again, it gets boring pretty quickly.

I also did not like the incomplete sentences sprinkled at plenty of places, which make understanding the sentences very difficult at times and make reader feel like a chore. At many occasions, I found myself at struggling to understand what the author means by broken sentences. My guess is that author wanted to sound poetic but those attempts failed in my opinion.

If you are going to pick up this book with the high hopes of reading an adventurous journey, filled with lots of twists and turns and lot of real life experiences, you are in for the disappointment, just like I was..

2.5 Stars

Nothing groundbreaking in this short read. I was interested in reading this after my visit to Cuba. Ernesto "Che" Guevara was, if nothing else, an interting and complex person.

In reading the novel you follow a young Che on a trip through Latin America before he graduates Medical School and before he meets Fidel Castro and puts himself in the history books. Essentially, the book is a diary of his trip. For a non "professional" writer, he wrote quite well. In reading you gather snippets of the beliefs lead him to follow the path that he did.

Outside of these brief snippets, you read some travelouge of his visits to latin american countryside. This becomes rather boring..... The book lost me at the end when I began to read a reprint of a speech he had given to graduating class of a cuban medical school. I was eerily simlar to the propoganda that was spouted by tour guides during my cuban vacation.

Overall, its interesting only if you want to get to know Che in his early years. Otherwise, you will want to skip it.

تا حالا نشده بود از خوندن بدبختی های یه نفر انقدر لذت ببرم و بخن��م، خاطرات سفر هشت ماهه ارنستو و دوستش آلبرتو به کشورهای امریکای جنوبی از مردم میگه، از مشکلات سفر میگه، از بی پولی میگه ولی سرشار از حس آزادیه، سرشار از حس زندگیه، حتی آدم رو ترغیب میکنه که خونه به دوشی و سفر این مدلی رو تجربه کنه.

"ما هنوز زنده بودیم و در متن حادثه زندگی حضور داشتیم، همین برای ما کافی بود. بین میلیاردها احتمال نبودن، قرعه بودن به نام ما افتاده بود"

5 stars for Che Guevara, I am simply in love with this man and although the book was average and I couldn't wait to finish it. This man is just one in a million and I wish I read about him before. My idea about him was just very vague. He is like a mythical creature, a symbol of freedom and revolution, a passionate humanitarian and for me one of the greatest souls ever lived.

My main problem with this book was the narrator (Bruno Gerardo), I deeply regretted listening to the audio because i just couldn't concentrate with the accent and pronunciation so I missed so many of the information.
Anyway am planning for a reread. This book is my first book by Guevara and will not be my last. It gave me a glimpse about how the young Guevara started forming his ideas and shaping his own personality. He was such a free soul, carefree young man, very compassionate for his fellow humans and considerate of the poor and sick.
I especially loved his letter to his mom. I have a simple rule, a confident strong man who loves his mom and treats her well instantly wins my heart's love and respect. He is such a legend. Called for freedom of oppressed nations, loved the poor and fought for them and was respected by the majority of people and revolutionary at heart. History won't see similar individual for decades to go.

The best passages in the book are in the last chapter when Che meets a man and they have an exchange which he reflects on:
the man says:

The future belongs to the people, and gradually, or in one strike, they will take power, here and in every country. The terrible thing is the people need to be educated, and this they cannot do before taking power, only after. They can only learn at the cost of their own mistakes, which will be very serious and will cost many innocent lives. Or perhaps not, maybe those lives will not have been innocent because they will have committed the huge sin against nature; meaning, a lack of ability to adapt. All of them, those unable to adapt — you and I, for example — will die cursing the power they helped, through great sacrifice, to create. Revolution is impersonal; it will take their lives, even utilizing their memory as an example or as an instrument for domesticating the youth who follow them. My sin is greater because I, more astute and with greater experience, call it what you like, will die knowing that my sacrifice stems only from an inflexibility symbolizing our rotten civilization, which is crumbling. I also know — and this won’t alter the course of history or your personal view of me — that you will die with a clenched fist and a tense jaw, the epitome of hatred and struggle, because you are not a symbol (some inanimate example) but a genuine member of the society to be destroyed; the spirit of the beehive speaks through your mouth and motivates your actions. You are as useful as I am, but you are not aware of how useful your contribution is to the society that sacrifices you.

Che:
n  

But despite his words, I now knew… I knew that when the great
guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I would be with the people. I know this, I see it printed in the night sky that I, eclectic dissembler of doctrine and psychoanalyst of dogma,
howling like one possessed, will assault the barricades or the trenches, will take my bloodstained
weapon and, consumed with fury, slaughter any enemy who falls into my hands. And I see, as if a
great exhaustion smothers this fresh exaltation, I see myself, immolated in the genuine revolution,
the great equalizer of individual will, proclaiming the ultimate mea culpa. I feel my nostrils dilate,
savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood, the enemy’s death; I steel my body, ready to do
battle, and prepare myself to be a sacred space within which the bestial howl of the triumphant
proletariat can resound with new energy and new hope.

n

Che was 24 at the time of writing his diary.

জীবনযাপনের পন্থাটা খারাপ লাগে নাই। লেখা তেমন কিছু না। মানে আমার কাছে মনে হয় নাই অন্তত।
দেখতে পাইলাম চেও লোকজনের সিমপ্যাথি আদায় করে, এক বছর হয়ে গেছে দাদা - ব্যাপারটা সেই ছিলো। লেখা তেমন কিছু না তাও সত্য না, পেরুর বর্ণনা সেই লাগছে। শেষ পেজের বয়ানটাও ভালোই।
এটা সত্য না যে এই বইয়ে তার বিপ্লবী হয়ে ওঠার ব্যাপারস্যাপার আছে। এরনেস্তো গেবারা যদি একজন প্রতাপশালী তেল ব্যবসায়ী হয়ে উঠতেন, তার ছাপও আমরা এই বইয়ে দেখে ছাড়তাম। ভদ্রলোক লেখালেখি করলে হইত। এই ক্ষেত্রে অবশ্য আমি কথা বলার কেউ না।
বুঝি না লাতিন আমেরিকা কেনো চোদ্দ টুকরা। এই ক্ষেত্রেও অবশ্য কথা বলার কেউ না আমি।

নাদভী ভাইরে ধন্যবাদ পড়তে দেয়ার জন্য।

“I began dressing slowly, a task which wasn’t very difficult because the difference between our night wear and day wear consisted, generally, of shoes.”

Two buddies take a break from their medical studies to tour their home country of Argentina, then Chile, Peru, Columbia, and Venezuela. What gives this fun, youthful adventure a different twist (in addition to the fact their destination is a leper colony) is that one of the buddies is Che Guevera, the guy who would go on to fight with Castro in the Cuban Revolution, and then to take up other fights in the Congo and then in Bolivia, where at age 39 he was captured and killed and then became an icon.

Most of the book is about how they found ways to get from one place to another and what they ate, and I understand from my own travels on the cheap that it really can be all about these two things. His diary gives us the feel of being on the road: survival, adventure, the companionship of travelers, the kindness of strangers.

What’s interesting about the journey of this book is that it helped make Che Che. Che, by the way, is just the Argentinian version of “mate” or “pal,” but those of us who’ve seen the t-shirts, the posters, we know what the name means to us. It means rebel. What he saw on this trip—poverty and illness and injustice--turned him from middle-class doctor into revolutionary.

You can see it in passages like this, which starts out like a tame entry in a Peruvian tourist’s diary:
“The most memorable part of Lima is the centre of the city around its magnificent cathedral … The church facades and alters demonstrate the complete range of Churrigueresque art in their love of gold. It was because of this vast wealth that the aristocracy resisted the armies of America up to the very last. Lima is the perfect example of a Peru which has never emerged from its feudal, colonial state. It is still waiting for the blood of a truly liberating revolution.”

The reading ranged from tedious to startling, unsettling to inspiring. I’m very happy to have had the experience.

"After receiving my degree I began to travel through Latin America. Except for Haiti and the Dominican Republic, I have visited - in one way or another - all the countries of Latin America. In the way I traveled, first as a student and afterward as a doctor, I beganto come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of the lack of resources... And I began to see there was something that, at that time, seemed to me almost as important as being a famous researcher or making some substantial contribution to medical science, and this was helping those people."


Photo taken from El Paso, TX with a view towards Cd. Juarez, Mexico (to be more specific, a vulnerable area called Anapra.

The introduction is too good. A Latin American Jack Kerouac but Kerouac was a better writer than young Che!
I didn't enjoy the first half, the narrative was mediocre & flashy. Then there's a steep transition, then you understand why the introduction is too good!
It’s about a journey of discovery that becomes one of self-discovery as well & here's the appeal of this journey where solitude meets solidarity. It’s about finding one’s place in the world — one that is worth fighting for looking beyond personal triumph.

A really interesting insight into the mind of young Ernesto "Che" Guevara. This is not just a travelogue. It has a strong political edge and explains what made Ernesto into Che-the revolutionary. His inclination towards a socialist mindset is palpable and well justified considering the state of South America in the middle of the 20th century.
Read this if you like to travel and care about society.

Ernesto or "Che" Guevara was a doctor. How many times have I thought of travelling and practicing medicine, reading books? Many times is the answer. How many times I've done it? Zero! ☹️

"There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly — not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice."

This book is a travelogue. The epic journey of a drop out medico and a biochemist across Latin America. Ernesto has beautifully described the landscapes as well as the raw lives of the common people of Latin America.
" the sea has always been a confidant, a friend absorbing all it is told and never revealing those secrets; always giving the best advice — its meaningful noises can be interpreted any way you choose."

The turmoils they face, the daily grind and the havoc created by America. Makes you see the "most powerful country" in a new way. When you see and live so close that kind of misery, a spark of rebellion is likely to be lit in your soul.
"It is at times like this, when a doctor is conscious of his complete powerlessness, that he longs for change: a change to prevent the injustice of a system..."
"How long this present order, based on an absurd idea of caste, will last is not within my means to answer, but it’s time that those who govern spent less time publicizing their own virtues and more money, much more money, funding socially useful works."

Though not fully enlightening us with how he became a guerilla leader, it does give us some insights through his writings. Surviving extreme temperatures and hunger and his love for "La Poderosa" and his friendship with Alberto Granado, we come to love "Che" in this book.

A good soul who met a horrible death at a young age.

Finally-
It is there, in the final moments, for people whose farthest horizon has always been tomorrow, that one comprehends the profound tragedy circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over