My Colombian War: A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind [Hardcover]

Silvana Paternostro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 13, 2007

A timely, evocative account of a reporter's reckoning with her homeland's volatile past

 

Growing up in the coastal city of Barranquilla, Colombia, Silvana Paternostro indulged in the typical concerns of a privileged young girl: friendships and parties, school and family. But soon it became apparent that life in Colombia would not go on as usual. Strange planes appeared overhead, the harbingers of the marijuana drug trade that would explode into cocaine wars over the next decade, and soon after, a disputed election would lead to demonstrations and kidnappings targeting the affluent landed elite--including Paternostro's family. A revolution was brewing, and the social inequalities reflected in her life would boil over into the most violent, most protracted, and most misunderstood civil war of our time.

In My Colombian War, Paternostro journeys back to the place where her family and her closest friends still live, weaving authentic experience into a history of this ongoing conflict. Through interviews she allows us to witness the treacherous war zone that Colombia has become, projected on the daily lives of its citizens. Paternostro's book is a stunning, comprehensive narrative of Colombia's past and present.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this disjointed memoir, Paternostro describes her return to war-torn Colombia, which she left in the 1970s as a teenager. A member of a wealthy, landholding family, Paternostro attended American schools and universities and made a career in the U.S. as a journalist, while giving little thought to the country she left behind. Yet the crises of cocaine and civil war draw her professional attention and an assignment from the New York Times allows her to return to her coastal hometown of Barranquilla. Once there, she discovers how much her conservative family's life of privilege is at odds with her own romantic left leanings, and how the danger of being kidnapped is only matched by her countrymen's refusal to acknowledge the civil war around them. All the elements are in place for a fascinating story and yet the memoir lacks essential clarity. Although Paternostro addresses various aspects of Colombian history, she doesn't illuminate them to any great depth, and the lack of a narrative through-line leaves the book adrift. Revealingly, Paternostro writes: I go around without contact lenses; that way I cannot see too much. I think otherwise I would not be able to smile, to talk, to sleep, to stay here. Ultimately, the author's decision not to see clearly leaves the reader as confused as she is. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

Colombian journalist Paternostro's autobiography chronicles two wars: the bloody, decades-long battle between leftist rebels and the Colombian government and the author's own struggle to embrace her Colombian identity while making a life for herself in the U.S. Raised in a privileged, conservative household in the Colombian coastal town of Barranquilla, Paternostro moved to the U.S. to attend college and later wrote for magazines, including Time and Newsweek. She returned to Colombia to chronicle the waves of violence that hit the country during the latter half of this century, newly aware of the hostilities that daily put her family in danger. Her interviews, interspersed with Colombian history and her own childhood memories, reveal the precariousness of life in that South American country, where selling a kilo of cocaine or maintaining a position of power is, at times, judged more valuable than anyone who might be standing in the way. Boyle, Katherine

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition edition (November 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805076050
• ISBN-13: 978-0805076059
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,510,840 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #72 in Books > Travel > Latin America > South America > Colombia

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I Plowed In The Sea, January 25, 2008

By 

Walter Crabtree (Pikeville, Tennessee USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Colombian War: A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind (Hardcover)

I worked in and out of Venezuela and Colombia off and on from 1957 to 1963. So after finishing "My Colombian War", I contrasted my experiences of decades earlier to those of Ms. Paternostro's more current memoirs. I n addition, from time to time I chat with friends still living in Colombia and it seems that conditions remain more or less the same and only the magnitude of corruption varies. Much like the stock market, it goes up and down in the short term, but over the long haul, unfortunately, trends ever upward.

Ms. Paternostro's unique motives for attempting this piece of journalism are her own and I cannot criticize them. However her methodology and the presentation of her story are ripe for examination. It seemed to me when she realized that her assignment was not going to be a lark, and when confronted with the cold reality of going to the streets and back roads to gather firsthand the stories of la gente, and possibly be endangered, she demurred and choose to watch the work of other journalists on television and sit in the clubs and construct her "Colombian War" over guava juice and old family photos.

Maybe I would have done the same as there is little motivation for me to feel obligated to inform the world concerning Colombia's tortured past and present. Consequently her ersatz story of her birthplace's anguish lacks the thoroughness of hard journalistic field research and therefore has little professional quality in my opinion. Her original intent was admirable yet amazingly naïve, as in refusing to wear her contact lens and thereby not having to look clearly and cleanly at her Colombia. Her story narrative constantly peaks out from behind the skirts of her family. At times this is charming, but mostly annoying as a theme too protracted. Yet it is her perspective and I believe there is value to the reader in being exposed to this cultural attitude. Nonetheless, for me, the final product was shallow, and finished like it began; all about Silvana.

In the early sixties my wife, a graduate of El Rosario University, practiced law and was a federal judge in an area south west of Bogotá called Usme, an area of great agrarian strife in those years. She was the only hope of the campesions for settling peacefully their disputes of agrarian reform. She left after a year, discouraged and fearful, but still in love "con su patria". She understood that the grinding poverty and fraudulent governments was an institutionalized culture from centuries earlier. A mere handful of cruel and psychopathic conquistadors, blessed by the church, designed and wove their implacable tapestry of violence over all the Latin Americas and maintained it by their greedy descendents who assured its continuity. In my opinion there is no value in attempting to salvage selected strands of that social drapery to explain and correct Colombia's contortions and so it might be better to bury the entire clothe and begin anew.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Everything that is wrong about this country..., September 5, 2008

By 

Lycos - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Colombian War: A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind (Paperback)

Fragmented, disjoined, selective and biased, in self-denial... reads like Colombia itself filtered through the ignorance and barbaric naiveté of the North American Press. One only sentence on the Patriotic Union... the victorious campaign of Uribe... Thanks but... no thanks...!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An interesting point of view from a fly on the wall, March 2, 2008

By 

Amado "Amado" (California, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Colombian War: A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind (Hardcover)

I really don't know how to start. I found the book to express the thoughts and feelings of a woman who was not comfortable with her latin identity and, through news reporting opportunities, gets a chance to try to bond with that identity in her American journalist comfort zone. I never got the feeling Ms. Paternostro came to accept her identity and it seemed more of a struggle with this identity rather than with the war being fought over there.

Still, I admire the work her tio Agustin made to bring an old-fashioned finca into the new era of empresas and how he was struggling as honestly as he could to find a middle ground between the two hardline ideologies. He seemed to be the one viewing things in realistic terms and listening honestly to all sides to understand the whole picture and how he could forge a new path. Perhaps he gave a pessimistic glint of hope ... or maybe not.

I wished the author would have discussed the fact so many people, esp. young women, prostitute themselves in that world of desperation. Yes, the ones that become your friend after a few minutes in a bar and become your girlfriend for regular doses of money. I saw a glimpse of that toward the end of the book, though it seems to have been overlooked by the author who wrote "In the Land of God and Man: A Latin's Woman's Journey."

As a case in point, I remember overhearing a female friend talking with her friend on the phone and mention that her American contractor lover had left a few weeks before and how she was relieved the STD results came back negative! I distanced myself quickly from this "friend," but wondered what kind of life that was she was living. I wonder if it was overlooked intentionally in this book.