Life in the Damn Tropics (Library of Modern Jewish Literature) [Hardcover]

David Unger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2002 | Series: Library of Modern Jewish Literature

Set in strife-torn Guatemala City in the early 1980s, this sophisticated, quasi-comedic tale depicts the decline and near-fall of a prominent Guatemalan Jewish family. In the face of military rule, terrorism, and sabotage, Marcos learns the truth about his brother Aaron, only to find that sibling secrets can be every bit as dangerous as civil unrest.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Three Jewish brothers struggle to keep their family's business ventures alive through a period of political unrest and upheaval in Unger's satisfying debut novel, set in Guatemala in the early 1980s. Marcos Eltaleph is the first-person narrator, a bored former playboy in his early 50s who finally discovers a sense of direction when his gorgeous new girlfriend, Esperanza, talks him into opening a nightclub. At first their new venture is a wild success, but dark clouds begin to gather in the background when the family's factories start to struggle and Marcos's brothers, Aaron and David, are forced to lay off Marcos from his token position in the company. The real troubles begin when Marcos's nightclub benefactor, a slick local military figure named Rafael Mendoza, uses Esperanza's and Marcos's financial difficulties to force them to turn the club into a watering hole for local servicemen. Marco suspects military foul play when Mendoza and his buddies begin holding private meetings there; eavesdropping on one of their sessions, Marcos watches as their plot against the local government is interrupted by an attack. Mendoza is killed and Marcos's brother Aaron, a prominent Jewish community leader involved in the subterfuge, is also shot. Unger puts his unique setting to good use as he layers his unusual story line, building the suspense despite some off-key passages in which Marcos complains unremittingly about getting old. The resolution features plenty of interesting twists and turns, but it's the portrayal of Latin American customs and Jewish values, as well as the exploration of the gray area in between, where Marcos and his brothers find themselves, that makes this book worth reading.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Marcos Eltaleph, the middle-aged narrator-hero of Unger's first novel, is always the odd man out. He is the middle brother in a family of Guatemalan Jews, an honest man surviving in a venal dictatorship, and a womanizing bachelor in a family that respects marriage and the work ethic. As Marcos ponders his dilemmas should he marry Esperanza, a former prostitute from Colombia; challenge governmental corruption when his family's business and eventually his family are threatened; or emigrate? the narrative presents Guatemala in the 1980s as corrupt, menacing, and volatile. Speaking in an ironic voice, Marcos is unconvincing in regard to his love for Esperanza or his anger at the attacks on the family. In this glib narrative, Unger, an award-winning translator, is unable to distill the conflicts of a community tempted by corruption and assimilation. However, because this novel is a part of the "Syracuse Library of Modern Jewish Literature" and an acute portrait of 20th-century Jewish life in Central America, it belongs in most Judaica collections. Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 301 pages
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press; 1 edition (April 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0815607377
• ISBN-13: 978-0815607373
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,900,527 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in Guatemala, David Unger lives in New York City. Author of The Price of Escape (Akashic Books, 2011), Para mi, eres divina (Random House Mondadori, Mexico, 2011), Ni chicha, ni limonada (F & G Editores, Guatemala, 2009; Recorded Books, 2010), Life in the Damn Tropics (Wisconsin University Press, Plaza y Janes (Mexico, 2004), Locus Press (Taiwan, 2007)), and In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful. He has translated sixteen books into English, including the work of Nicanor Parra, Silvia Molina, Elena Garro, Barbara Jacobs, Mario Benedetti, Rigoberta Menchu.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Coming of age--at last--in the tropics, November 10, 2004

By 

J. Heiman (NY, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Life in the Damn Tropics: A Novel (Paperback)

Marcos Eltaleph finds himself under a kind of house-or hospital-arrest at the start of Life in the Damn Tropics, restricted to his bed. In fact, the book begins and ends in bed, romps around the boudoir pretty frequently, draws a good number of ideas and plans from bed, but it's not a dream-world book. No, there's no magically shifting line here between levels of reality. What happens to and around Marcos Eltaleph is this-world-real, violent, irrational and passionate. Life in the Damn Tropics is a great read, spare and funny, sympathetic and justly satiric toward its struggling, naïve hero.

Any novel that begins with a character who wakes up reminds me of Kafka's story, but unlike Gregor Samsa, Marcos Eltaleph wakes up to find that not he but the world around him, Guatemala City of the early 1980s, has become nearly unrecognizable. Granted, Eltaleph has been living on a sinecure, cared for by his entrepreneurial brothers, and he reaches his mid-50s happily unaware of what it really takes to make a living. But he suffers mightily for his inattention-hemorrhoids (a reminder of what he thinks of himself?) are not the least of it-and the suffering does help him to refine his vision of his family, himself, and the culture in which he is truly a resident alien.

Specifically, two things cause Marcos distress. First, his brothers. They have provided for him and insured his naiveté, and they have made him their sap. Neither Aaron, with his prominent place in the Jewish community, nor David, president of the family business, has time to waste under house arrest, so Marcos is offered up, along with a significant bribe, as part of the incidental cost of doing business in Guatemala. No malice, just business. Second source of grief is Guatemala itself, and this, I think, is one of the novel's savviest inventions. Guatemala of tropical lowlands and high cloud forests is almost absent, but the jungle is present in every one the unanticipated cruelties, again, none personal. It's all business (even the politics) in the decayed, militaristic society, the deaths, the disappearances, the bombings, all as impersonal as being mauled by a jaguar or strangled by a creeper vine in the dense forest.

But Marcos is not so innocent that he fails to examine himself. He gets the message. Forced to begin managing his own affairs when the family business can no longer support him, he opens a nightclub. When he finds out that a bunch of generals and idealistic boys and a couple of business brains are using his place to plan another overthrow of the government, Marcos reckons his own semi-conscious role in the eruption of one of Guatemala's social volcanoes, and he takes action...at great cost. He moves with the purpose of a young man on a character-building quest, only this time it's a "bald, bare-butted fifty-three-year-old newborn," as Eltaleph describes himself, who does the growing. That irony alone makes Damn Tropics a really satisfying read.

2 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars dystopias in diaspora -- gallows humor prevails, February 22, 2003

By 

from the fringe "beyondutopia" (norman, ok USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Life in the Damn Tropics (Library of Modern Jewish Literature) (Hardcover)

Jewish diaspora narratives lend themselves quite readily to absurdism. Life is comprised of a concatenation of illogical events, sequential by chronology, but nothing else. The search for truth is subverted by the constant reminder that there is no truth, and that any of the tenets of essence that one might have employed to assure oneself of a bit of certainty in the world are utterly hollow.

Language is layered and mediated, worlds are polyphonous and dialogical, but there is no actual response, since several languages are employed simultaneously. Causality is in effect, but it is primitive, and meaningless, except in the construction of metaphor. Example: the consumption of raw turtle eggs lead to immediate, severe, violent food poisoning. However, this is also an echo of the existential response to nostalgia; the memories (submerged, sad, sweet) of the last time one ate turtle eggs.

Marcos Eltaleph, the protagonist, is hostage to the misdeeds of his brother, Aaron Eltaleph, who is under hospital arrest in Guatemala City, where he is suspected of double-dealing by Guatemalan officials. Marcos, forced into a position of loyalty that threatens to undermine the only way(s) he knows himself, begins to implode psychologically as the family scandal expands.

The energy of implosion is picaresque, and there is a sort of joy in the destruction of preconceived notions. Adrenaline is preferable to logical response. The things that have value are made valueless, including life, work, human invention. Aaron's venture into the nightclub business is a perfect example of this. It begins as a venture filled with promise, then turns into a gathering place for the Guatemalan military and heavy-hitters -- always dangerous in Central America.

Much of the narrative rests on the deliberate countering of family values and Jewish tradition. Marcos rebels, or perversely disregards, the core values of his family by having a Colombian prostitute as a girlfriend, by making deals with untrustworthy, highly venal partners, the Guatemalan dictatorship / mob.

Yet, there is a celebration of the eccentric, wily, and street-smart. The breakdown of rigid societal structures allows others to emerge with dionysian energy. Metamorphosis is possible.

The setting of Life in the Damn Tropics heightens contrasts between luxury "compound" vacations and the jungle around it. Jungle, dnager, invasion of body and self are ever-present metaphors for life in an absurd situation caught between competing interests.

Nevertheless, Guatemala, which is perhaps the quintessential dystopia -- an infernal inversion of Eden -- provides an anarchic, playful catalyst to life.