Customer Reviews

Death of Che Guevara

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To browse Amazon and find this magnificent novel entirely unreviewed shocks me. Jay Cantor's 1983 debut remains among the two or three foremost accomplishments of the American generation born after World War II -- as significant a work, in other words, as the best of Richard Powers or Tim O'Brien or Richard Price. Yet Cantor's name is considerably less known than any of theirs, and apparently readers are doing without the heady and sumptuous historical reframing offered by DEATH OF CHE GUEVARA.

A shame, because few novels will offer so many traditional satisfactions -- in particular deepening emotional penetration and vivid action setpieces -- while at the same time showing such alertness to the challenge facing the tradition of long prose narratives. DEATH OF CHE GUEVARA works up great historical realism, including hair-raising battle scenes with the Cuban guerillas of 1956 and '57, packed with startling details like the taste of monkey meat during Che's '67 sojourn in the Bolivian jungle. Yet the book's multiple voices and approaches also break down each of its major lines of development, going so deeply into the story's central revolutionary conciousness as to raise probing questions about his calling.

Yet Che unites everything here, a kind of Christ even when he most closely suggests Caesar -- or the monomaniacal Ahab, to choose a literary reference this book invites. Cantor's allusions to Melville, subtly laid, are earned throughout by his complicated interplay of media (the diaries of different characters, for instance, generate fascinating counterpoint) and an overall inevitability that has the stuff of myth. There's genuine heroism in a number of the turning points here, and at the same time there's a self-destructiveness etched with fierce emotional accuracy.

But no summary in the internet's agate type can convey the richness of Cantor's achievement. No recent US novel I can think of wrings such mucky vitality out of harsh psychological and economic facts of life, and at the same time dramatizes a greater authorial awareness, a vista of history outside of anyone's particular time and flesh. For this kind of range and mastery, in fact, readers generally have to look to foreigners like Saramago or Pamuk. But such readers are poorer, by far, for failing to discover -- and devour -- THE DEATH OF CHE GUEVARA.