The Last Post...or...?

Boom! I am back...the Barbarus Balcanicus strikes again! Or...gets back to civilization????

I thought I'd mess with the chronological order a little bit...in part to keep things in the spirit of the books we've read, and also because I have not quite managed to...let's not go there!

What can I say about this course? When I started reading the first book I thought: "I can't Ffffffacun...do this!!!" (ok, so there goes my lame attempt to emulate the style of the greatest Latin American novel of the 20th century...) But yes, Sarmiento's book was, for the most part, a snoozefest! Things got better from The President on. And yes, I have a special place in my heart for I the Supreme... It was, by far, the most challenging book but I also found it refreshing to get away from the more conventional forms of story-telling. While I am sure that there are aspects of these works that have been lost in translation, I enjoyed the richness of language in each (with the exception of Facundo). This might be an English major thing...or not...but I love the play with language in both The President and, especially, I the Supreme. I already wrote about Lot's wife ("did she invent lotteries?") in an earlier post as an example that struck my fancy...

I have to say that I was surprised by the amount of humour in these dictator novels, especially the last three. I think that that is, in part, what makes them readable. Without the humour, reading about such dark and disturbing periods in the histories of various countries might be too much to take. But, there is a fine balance here too. The portrayal of these dictators as sycophants would be completely funny if it was not so tragic.

The theme of this course was writing and power and I have discussed this to some extent earlier. I wanted, however, to point out the power of the writer that is, in some ways, transferred to the reader. For this, one has to look at the books we did as part of one whole. With Facundo, we have a supposedly objective, historical account of a dictatorial figure. The President gives us an insider's point of view but in the form of a bigger picture. I the Supreme allows us, for the first time, to get to the expressed thoughts of a dictator (we can never get directly into Francia's thoughts); The General in His Labyrinth for the first time shows a 'dictator's' doubts about what he is/is not doing--the frailty and humanity of such a figure; and, The Feast of the Goat shows that dictatorial paranoia is not always that (ie. not always completely unfounded). In a sense, each of the books answers questions left over from the previous one, and each does so from a different perspective on life in a dictatorship. In this sense, the power the reader is endowed with is a power no human being can have in real life--seeing things from virtually every persepective.

But...the If-I-had-to-pick-a- dictator...Award goes to (drumroll).... Simon Bolivar.

I enjoyed reading these books and am definitely planning to read some more Latin American lit...Of course, I have to finish The Feast of the Goat first!

So this is the last post...but not really, because I intend to post on said goat...

*NB: My recent consumption of alcoholic beverages was not limited to today's class :P