Customer Reviews

Bad Vibes.

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I lived in Chile two years ago and the book everybody was reading was Alberto Fuguet's MALA ONDA or Bad Vibes. I'm so excited i's finally coming out in English. It's a very cool, contemporary politcal story told by this rich kid who hates disco music, dances during the curfew, hangs out with surfers, snorts his dad's coke and reads american books and magazines. Bad Vibes is a fresh hurrican to come out of the typical magical realistic Southamerican landscape. This book is hip, real, funny and emotionally compelling. It's quite american and, on the other hand, it's so chilean. It's wierd how a dictatorship can affect a teenager's view. Matías Vicuña (the narrator) is still a teenage though, no matter what he sees. He just has to cope. I really recommend it. Ralph Anderson, Tucson, AZ

I read this book years ago and recently saw the film "Y tu mama tambien", which made me come back to Bad Vibes. I recommend them both. Mala Onda represents the new voice of Chilean writers, and of kids all over the world growing up amidst drugs, malls, boredom, etc. This book certainly tells a different story of Pinochet than all the history books I've read on the seventies and eighties in Chile.

When will more of Fuguet's novels be translated into English?

Matias Vicuna's last name is no accident. He lives in Santiago, Chile, not far from the habitat of the animal whose fur caused a scandal for the Nixons because it was not simple cloth. This is a story that is more than the whole whole cloth - it has the feeling of direct connection from experience through the keyboard and into prose. The story covers the week before the 1980 plebiscite endorsing a new Constitution for Chile, one that to some extent made Pinochet the legitimate ruler. The plebiscite appeared to change nothing, but in the life of young Matias, everything changes that week. The story is more than it seems, and so is Matias. He has been compared in other revues to Holden Caulfield, but to this reader, Matias surpasses J.D. Salinger's character. He is better read, and less sheltered, despite his privileged existence in the economic stratosphere of his country. The challenges he confronts as a young man in a changing country are analogous to Holden's, but more complex. The sex, drugs, and rock and roll add an extreme diminsion to his detailed ruminations about teen-aged obsessions, so that Matias confronts his family and its history in a context of greater personal risk than did Holden Caulfield and at a time of greater political risk as well. This novel could be a harbinger of coming of age in 21st century North America, and if so, its author would probably not be surprised. His character looks to the Village Voice and the US music scene for inspiration, but Fuguet is very clever. His inspiration is to be found in the last name of his character, in the Andes, and in a way of life, or a way to make sense of life, that is as warm, soft, and beautiful as the skin of the animal for whom his character is named. As for the nature of the animal itself, the novel makes no demands,no pretensions, but the inward journey of Matias Vicuna is a metaphor for getting the reader inside the skin of the beast. It is a fast-moving, intense story told as a kind of diary, but its meanings linger and transform after the race through the pages, the parties, the girls, the songs, the drugs, the drinks, the relatives, and the politics. "Bad Vibes" is a book to remember.

I think that Alberto Fuguet has so much to say. He is the only who tell all the trut about Chile. Maybe he is a "bad copy of Sallinger" but we are in Chile and he try to make a different type of writing and he definitly is making that. Chile is so "cartucho" that Fuguet is the better writer in Chile.

I, as a chilean, can say that the novel refects exactly the moment that Chile was in the 80's and how that determinated the thoughts of an 17 year old boy, that belonged to the most powerful social class in Chile.

Im a chilean project writer and I must say that the first novel of Fuguet is better than all the boring literature that I had to read at school. With a great slang language, full of typical idioms, this book is a great company for every moment, a book that Me and my friends revisit every time to laugh, to meditate or just to ebjoy with the dialogs. Inmerse in the false boom of the early 80s, full of drugs and desperation, Matias Vicuña reaches his limit in a city with the world record of mental illness: Santiago de Chile. To my point of view, it is the first step of literature aparted from the mainstream and that talks to topics that most chilean youth lives every day. Unfair in the treatment of Pinochet goverment, the left-handed ideas of Fuguet cannot destroy the main value of the novel: a simply and caotic story, a mirror of a very strange latin society and a particular political moment. (This book is also recommended now in many schools here, in Chile, for Literature classes) END

Bad Vibes, by Alberto Fuguet is a very real image of latin american society. Here in the states, we think of peasants and sombraros when really its the same as it is here. Matias Vicuna, a 17 year old rich kid, is bored and annoyed with everything, yet he has a very realistic view of whats going on around him. I identify with him in many ways, and i love him like he is a real person. I've read the book at least 8 times, and I'll read it many more. It's like my comfort, my one true friend when no one else is there for me. I only wish I could get ahold of something else written by Alberto Fuguet. I reccommend this book to anybody who falls in love with books like I do. Thank you Mr. Fuguet for introducing me to Matias Vicuna, I am so glad I met him.

I'm a chilean young. I read "Mala Onda", when I was 17, I thinked that so cool. After that, I followed the Fuguet's suggestion about to read "The Catcher in the Rye".It's his "Bad Vives"' inspiration. Can you get something more with Bad Vives? I don't think so... This year, I'm 21, I read Ch. Bukowski. Fuguet is just a bad copy of Salinger and Bukowski. I think he took classes with them to learn to write. (If you have read Salinger or Bukowski it isn't so new) I don't wanna read Fuguet's book anymore. You will know: Salinger+Bukowski ==> Fuguet. But he (Fuguet) will never be like one of them (the american Masters).

I was a teenager in the 80s in Chile. Not in Santiago, but my adolescence was pretty similar to that of Matias V. I guess I liked this book a lot mainly cuz it, in someway, represents our generation. I've read "Sobredosis" and am reading "Por favor rebobinar" of Fuguet, I really like his style. I recommend the book to everybody. And to that reviewer who wrote that Matias didn't see all the abuses being donde by Pinochet, I tell you: I lived it, and the people who died under Pinochet's goverment were mostly bandals who'd go and kill or rob people from the upper class just for being from the upper class. They were the ones who had ruined the coumtry and were stealing and killing, Pinochet saved the biggest part of the country.

OK. first than anything, i got to say that Alberto (the author), have an exelent style on his writing and you can see it on Bad vibes, and if you know spanish, you also can read Bad vibes on this idiom. The name of the book?... MALA ONDA.

When i say that Alberto Fuguet have an exelent narrative, if you want to, i mean that he writes as he wants, not following any rules of the chilean literature, and that is something cool for the young people of this country, and my opinion is based on my own experience as a chilean teenager reading somebody that speaks as any person of my age, making the book easy to understand. I also think that the idea to edit the book for the "gringos" was cool 'cause it deserves it, i mean that the message in the book, as i see it, is an x-ray of the damn culture of those years here, in chile, and gives you an idea of somebody like Matìas Vicuña, trying to live a complicated life, doing it in the wrong way sometimes but giving that perfect example for the people that read Bad vives to make a meditation of his own life. that is my vision, that is the main idea of my comment, not forgeting to tell'ya that this book is very fun too. Read it, if you are not chilean, it will be a lot better, if you look to expand your vision of the world, the life, the people...i don`t know. Bye.