Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (P.S.) (Paperback)

by Ben Fountain (Author)
Key Phrases: Brief Encounters, Che Guevara, The Lion's Mouth (more...)

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (April 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060885602
• ISBN-13: 978-0060885601
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #39,163 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Things Happen, December 2, 2006

By	Steven Anderson (Dallas) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a not unproblematic worthwhile read, October 10, 2006

By	Q (Portland, ME United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (Hardcover)

The enthusiasm and praises for Ben Fountain's collection is well-founded and well-deserved, so I won't repeat them here. But for those readers who may be interested in a different kind of review, I would like to add here that my only criticism with this collection is on the ideological/political level.

While the stories here are careful to avoid, indeed subvert, certain stereotypes and cliches, they also tend to reinforce others, the long history and tradition of western ethnography casting its problematic shadow, threatening to reduce not just the characters and landscapes to hollywood-esque cliches, but also the critical politics addressed here into facile journalism. To be sure, Fountain does resist Manichean, or back and white, moralizing (as one reader below suggests), and certainly, he does not shy away, for instance, from looking critically at his first-world characters' position relative to their third-world counterparts, but ultimately the stories are haunted by what one might call the "heart of darkness" syndrome that still, unfortunately, informs much of western literary, cinematic and journalistic output today.

Having said this, however, my intention is not to deter readers from this book. On the contrary, the stories here are well-written, well-crafted and rare in that there are very few contemporary North American writers who overtly engage with political issues in their short fiction (perhaps a good comparison here might be Ward Just, or even Tom Bissel and Tony D'Souza, though personally, for purely political/ideological reasons, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend the latter two). And as other readers have attested, there is a lot to admire here, a lot to enjoy and gain for those interested in good stories that offer not just engaging situations and plot, likeable characters and voice, but also the political broadstrokes of American involvement abroad. Particularly if you enjoy writers like Charles D'Ambrosio, Scott Snyder, Daniel Alarcon, perhaps David Means, Judy Budnitz, and even TC Boyle, you'll probably enjoy this collection. In fact it is hard to imagine that this collection would completely disppoint. And it is precisely for all of these reasons that I wished that the collection had been even more critically aware.

8 of 8 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 (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (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