Customer Reviews

El pais bajo mi piel (Spanish Edition)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Gioconda is another magnificent representative of the Latin American generation of authors that emerged in the seventies and eighties amidst social turmoils. Gioconda's artistry of words and poetry are evident throughout this book. Also the book arrangement, i.e. two threads set at two different time periods of her life, if not innovative fits nicely to convey her passionate, powerfully feminine message. This is perhaps the strongest point in this autobiography: the utmost defense of "las compañeras" in her struggle for equality and respect.

Other little jewels are Gioconda's experience with iconic men like Torrijos and Fidel. These two anecdotes deserve to be in a study of the human condition: even in an egalitarian or progressive mind, machismo can be present.

My 4 out of 5 star rate for this book is related to the author's ambiguous political position after the collapse of Sandinismo. In the last part of the book her message comes forth blurred by Gioconda's comfortable upper middle-class life in a serene Californian homestead. Suddenly, all that life-commitment with the revolution becomes a Sunday afternoon TV movie on "Oxygen" or "We". Then several pages, filled with apparently extensively meditated explanations, try to justify why she chose comfort to revolution. Personally, I think she closed the circle (as she likes to repeat through her book): she came back to her cradle in a solacing environment. Eventually, she goes back to Nicaragua to plunge back into "people's struggle" while being aware that she can always return to his Californian refuge. Not exactly a revolutionary life.

Un viaje sobre los amores, la vida y la historia de Nicaragua a traves de la experiencia de esta gran escritora.

Un libro que todo el mundo deberia de leer.

It's a great story, told in prose by a poet, but between the lines the verses of poetry perspire..perhaps an ambiguous relation, but isn't life dual after all, an amalgam of contradictions?.. I'd say that she is too benevolent with the Sandinistas, but as someone who has also left Nicaragua pushed away by the very particular circumstances that we all Nicaraguans have lived through, I understand her feelings and feel deeply identified with her agony- I was but a young Sandinista soldier once...nothing should transcend our own human condition- I could have died by then and wonder now what for- talking on our own humanity, we begin to turn less human by the measurement of letting anything stand above our own being,whether to become a saint, a martyr, a demon or a killer. At the end, I think Gioconda understands this very well, for she knows now that she is just like all others, a citizen of humankind, from here I'd say to her: Bravo Poetisa!

I've read the book (in its extremely sensitive and emphatic German translation immediately after my wife finished reading it and told me that it was a must for me to read!)

The "must" was worthwhile because of the incredible breadth of Belli's writing expressiveness and intensity of the emotions expressed. In this respect I felt with her and for her in all her moods, life situations, her frustrations and her moments of joy.

Reading it in that way, it is truthful, self-critical, just fascinating.

But....and the BUT is my critical BUT.....where Belli, whose dairy-like autobiography this is (because otherwise whe would never have been able to reconstract the three decades of her life she talks about in "The Country Under My Skin" where she recalls all those names an situations with the accuracy as she does), the political aspect being portrayed in the book is strikingly unfair
and is in severe contradiction to what is known to have actually happened between the terribel '72 earthquake and the end of the millenium as regards the Sandinistas and their revolution and the latter-day developments.
The political stance Ms. Belli takes throughout her narrative is heavily lop-sided, if not naïve. Ms. Belli, who has in many ways "run into her hated enemy's arms" by living in the US, and does not really appear to have had any qualms about it, nor about passing on pure hear-say about political intrigues and movemements, acribically puts down dates and names and improper behaviour of the so-called enemies of the revolution, but she does not find any need to set right the warped political picture her Sandinista ideologists have slyly - and successfully - embedded in her mind.

Ms. Belli should stick to writing her very beautiful prose - and stop loving her country by lashing out at phantoms, and painting a halo of "libertador" on irrespressive revolutionaries like Castro at al.....Nicaragua has not stopped suffering from the aftereffects of power-obsessed personalities, much as as it had been suffering from the Somoza nightmare.
To be sure that I am not just blowing off steam for the sake of criticism, I have once again taken time and consulted credible sources on the actual facts of Nicaraguas transition from Somozism to Sandinism-Tercereistas and the years that followed....and have tried to do this without being blind on one eye...

What I have finally found to be a representative truth does certainly not identify with many aspects Ms. Belli sets forth in her autobiography.
Personally, I love South America. My mother tongues were English and Spanish, having spent my childhood in Venezuela, Argentina, Perú and Colombia.