From Publishers Weekly
A founder of the Sandinistas and Nicaragua's former minister of Interior, Borge blends history, reportage, autobiography and an account of his decades of anti-Somoza struggle in this rambling montage. The most effective sections describe the Somoza dictatorship's bloody repression, the author's harrowing years in prison and his precarious existence as a guerrilla. Borge, whose mother's land was confiscated by Somoza, glorifies Fidel Castro, Che Guevara ("Che is as impertinent as Christ") and Carlos Fonseca, principal founder of the Sandinistas. He chronicles direct U.S. interventions in Nicaragua from 1854 onward and paints a heroic picture of the Sandinistas as a political vanguard that awakened the masses. Interleaved with manifestos, news articles and poems, his often lyrical, impassioned narrative includes cameos of such figures as novelist Julio Cortazar, comrade Daniel Ortega and poets Jose Coronel Urtecho and Ernesto Cardenal.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This is a bilingual edition of 20 selections originally published in English in two previous collections, Clara and Strange Things Happen Here . The themes, as wide-ranging as those encountered in Open Door ( LJ 6/15/88), encompass political allegory, surrealistic myth, religious parables, and horror tales. Valenzuela's characters are a potpourri of opposites: soldiers and pacifists, peasants and the bourgeois, children and the aged, heretics and fanatics. She is at her best when cutting to the heart of the painful political realities of a repressive society. In this regard, the title story sets the pace. A man, virulently opposed to censorship, becomes a censor in order to save a letter he has written. Ironically, he reverses himself to become the most zealous of censors. In this collection, Valenzuela has moved beyond the tempered innocence of Borges to create a realism often expressed in surrealistic terms. Those stories that embrace these terms are the most ambiguous and revealing. Of interest to public library and academic literature collections.
-Mary Ellen Beck, Troy P.L., N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
-Mary Ellen Beck, Troy P.L., N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
