Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories [Hardcover]

Ben Fountain (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 1, 2006

The well-meaning protagonists of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara are caught—to both disastrous and hilarious effect—in the maelstrom of political and social upheaval surrounding them. Ben Fountain's prize-winning debut speaks to the intimate connection between the foreign, the familiar, and the inescapably human.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Six of these eight debut short stories feature Americans abroad, on modified grand tours stopping in Colombia, Haiti, Myanmar and Sierra Leone. As aid workers, soldiers and hangers-on, they grapple with some of the darkest circumstances in the contemporary world, their struggles made absurd by the ease with which they can and do return home. A few are honorably conflicted, including the NGO worker who betrays her diamond-smuggling lover. Others, including an indolent golfer who sells his soul along with his game, and a writer nursing an obsession with Che Guevara, draw less sympathy. Fountain seems to see both travel and introspection as amoral indulgences, which means there's serious writerly self-hatred here, since those indulgences feed his tales. The stories that avoid moral writhings for postmodern fable are his most memorable. When a Haitian fisherman discovers a drug runners' drop-off and tries to alert the police, only to find them driving shiny new SUVs, he turns next to the village's voodoo revelers"who have better ideas about what to do with the dope. Lively work, with much to detest and much to enjoy. (Aug.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Tales of Americans subsisting in the third world and discovering new ways to think and behave are commonplace. But Ben Fountain's lively, humorous treatment of his troubled characters earns generous praise. Instead of focusing his deft choices of words and inventive metaphors on a character's internal experience, the author uses his literary prowess to examine the uncomfortable complexities of life outside the United States. He also takes time to portray the "dunes of garbage … so rich in colorful filth" on Haitian streets. That may be enough to prove, as the New York Times says, what a "heartbreaking, absurd, deftly drawn" collection this is.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Ecco (August 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060885580
• ISBN-13: 978-0060885588
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #805,576 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ben Fountain has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writers Award, an O.Henry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and two Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Awards, among other honors and awards. His fiction has been published in Harper's, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Stories from the South: The Year's Best, and his nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times and The New York Times Sunday Magazine, among other publications. His reportage on post-earthquake Haiti was nationally broadcast on the radio show This American Life. He and his family live in Dallas, Texas.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 51 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Things Happen December 2, 2006

By Steven Anderson

Format:Hardcover

I really don't like short stories very much anymore-especially the kind that appear in places like "The New Yorker" (which is otherwise an exemplary magazine) - for the most part, it seems to me that these stories are humorless, shapeless chronicles of middle class angst that start from nowhere and, if you actaully bother to finish one, conlude in a morass of pointless self pity- leaving this reader with only one agonized thought - "WHO CARES".

If those are your kind of storeies, do not buy "Brief Encounters". Fountain's stories are crisp, compelling and often mordantly funny - there's not a wasted sentence, really not a wasted word. And, best of all, THINGS HAPPEN, EVENTS TRANSPIRE, and you turn the pages to see what's going to happen next.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Very Fine Art of Short Story Writing: Ben Fountain Arrives September 16, 2006

By Grady Harp HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

One hint that a writer of short stories or novellas or even full novels for that matter is the sense given to the reader that all of the information is so solidly shared that the writer must be speaking from autobiographical stance. Yet all we gather from the brief jacket bit about Ben Fountain is that he has won some impressive literary awards, is editor of Southwest Review, and lives in Texas with his little family! There is nothing to suggest a world traveler who has grown into the soil of the various parts of the world he molds into his stories. We are left with the conclusion that Fountain is simply a brilliant writer - and that is even more impressive.

Eight stories are served with exquisite writing technique, fastidious attention to detail, and an endless imagination for bizarre events that serve as a stage for characters at once participating in the darker elements of the world's doings while finding some sense of exotica on a planet that has heretofore seemed so blasé. He takes us to Haiti, explores cocaine trafficking there by both the innocent poor folk observers and the corrupt police force; he follows a devoted ornithologist in captivity in Colombia who gains insight into Revolution; he examines a strange relationship between a young lady and her older diamond hunting mate in Sierra Leone ('Being an American these days, that's sort of like being a walking joke, right?...'); he follows a bumbling golf pro whose sad life catches up with him in Myanmar; he takes us back to the turn of the 20th century to uncover a child piano prodigy who is able to play a Fantasy for piano written by a pianist who shared her deformity of having eleven fingers; he deals with a couple who must cope with the husband's 'co-marriage' to a Haitian voodoo goddess; and he obsesses on tales of encounters with the ever-popular Che Guevara.

With each story he transports us wholly to the place of action and the interstices of the minds of the character he paints. Though this reader has not been to Haiti, Sierra Leone or Myanmar to check the reality of Fountain's prose descriptions there, the world of music for the piano is close enough to have profound respect for his writings about piano technique and music history and Vienna. Fountain MAKES us believe his stories, tales that are more like histories than fiction, so well drawn are they. Here is a writer of inordinate gifts. We can only hope he is busy at work crafting a novel to see how well his brief stories can be transported into extended form. Ben Fountain is most assuredly an author to watch! Highly recommended. Grady Harp, September 06 Read more ›

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Brief Encounters with Che Guevera November 13, 2006

By R. Kavaler

Format:Hardcover

The best book of short stories I have read in years. The usual complaint about literary short stories is that they concern themselves with insignificant domestic issues and ignore the larger world; and the most telling complaint about fiction that does address the larger world issues is that it is boring. Well, here is a writer who can enter into any part of the Third World, however remote, however alien to our Western vourgeois life, and tell a story with dramatic power, in a language that is enviably concrete and vivid, with charcters pulsating with life, with suspense in the movement of the action painfully intense, yet without any tricks of the trade. I have never read such goo writing applied to such a world-view. Whether it is Haiti, Thailand, Sierra Leone, Columbis--this is the familiar territory of human character, for better and worse. With such books as this, reading becomes the real staff of life.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Politics and the Short Story January 31, 2007

By A. Ross HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

This debut collection is welcome relief from the usual workshopped-to-death, navel-gazing, interior short stories that seem so prevalent in the U.S. Fountain likes to take his characters to parts of the world not particularly welcoming to Americans and put them in challenging situations. For example, he has a particular interest in Haiti (which he's visited approximately thirty times), and it forms the backdrop for three of the stories.

In "Reve Haitien" (originally published in Harper's), a chess-playing Organization of American States observer in Haiti following Aristide's 2004 departure agrees to help a charismatic guerilla member. The plot involves smuggling paintings by Haitian masters to Miami in exchange for cash the guerillas can use to buy arms. The story shares themes with several others in the collection, as the Westerner comes to sympathize with the oppressed native and tried to help. (The main point of interest in the story for me was the paintings, many of which were by artists whom my grandparents collected in the '60s. One minor snag in the plotline is that the paintings are described as being rolled up and hidden in a duffle bag, but most of the paintings by these artists in my grandparents' collection are on solid chipboard and rather harder to convey.)

"The Good Ones Are Already Taken" takes place in North Carolina, but also references Haiti, as a young soldier's wife eagerly awaits the return of her Special Forces husband from Operation Uphold Democracy (1994-95). The husband returns home greatly affected by his interaction with the Haitian spirit world, forcing the wife to work hard to understand. The material is somewhat over the top, but Fountain manages to make it work for the most part.... "Bouki and the Cocaine" (first published in Zoetrope and available freely online) is a pretty straightforward story about some poor fishermen whose civic attempts to interdict the local cocaine traffic result only in the local police profiting. In an Robin Hood-style operation, they decide to steal one more load and use a Port-au-Prince contact to help the community. The finale is somewhat predictable, but enjoyable in the manner of an Elmore Leonard caper.

In "Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera", a graduate ornithology student is swept up by FARC guerillas in Columbia and must survive as a hostage for half a year. Over the course of this time (which seems to be circa 1999), he gets to know the guerillas and comes to understand their struggle -- only to have the carpet jerked out from under him at the end. Originally published in Zoetrope (and available for free at their web site), it's a fairly solid piece, if a little too precious toward the end. "Asian Tiger" (also published in Zoetrope and available freely online) is my favorite of the collection. Here we meet a divorced pro golfer of the lowest tier, reduced to playing obscure, fourth-rate tournaments. After appearing the "Myanmar Peace and Enlightened Leadership Cup", he is made a lucrative offer he can't really refuse (for the sake of his daughters' college fund). Through his naive eyes, the Burmese junta takes on an even more bizarre visage, as he accompanies generals on foursomes involving shady American oilmen, a spook, and Japanese suits.

It's out of the frying pan and into the fire, as the next story (which first appeared in The Paris Review), "The Lion's Mouth", visits war-ravaged Sierra Leone. A female American aid worker hustles to improve the lives of a tiny few, while also getting sexually entangled with a diamond dealer. The topic of "blood diamonds" has been well-covered elsewhere, and this story does little to add to the topic. It's also the third story in the book to involve some manner of smuggling, and while the portrait of the various rebels, UN peacekeepers, and shady operatives is keen, the story itself is entirely predictable. The title story is a series of five vignettes in which the author recounts his fascination with Che Guevara and his encounters with several people who may have known him. It's rather aimless in comparison to the rest of the collection and didn't do much for me. "Fantasy for Eleven Fingers" is somewhat of an outlier as well, taking place in the music world of 19th-century Vienna, and following the strange story of the titular piano composition. It does an effective job of capturing the time and place, and there's a decent-enough story there, but it's so different from the rest of the collection that its inclusion is somewhat jarring.

On the whole, this is definitely a collection worth dipping into, but perhaps not as vital as some of the more enthusiastic reviews make out. One theme that is worth highlighting as particularly important is Fountain's representation of travel as privilege. In most of the stories, Americans "visit" the third world by choice and are able to leave, while those who live there suffer onward (and get exploited by Western business interests). I'll definitely keep an eye out for his Fountain's next work. Read more ›