Customer Reviews

Whispering Campaign; Stories from Mesoamerica

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Whispering Campaign is a very good read. It's the images in the writing that remain, lingering in the mind long after the book is back on the shelf. I heartily recommend it, especially to the reader who likes to travel, even vicariously. It's like you're in the same room with the characters, sweating with the heat and slapping mosquitoes on your arm!

Lawrence Lihosit is an inveterate self-publisher, has served us up a pungent and tasty array of stories in his Whispering Campaign - Stories from Mesoamerica. They have the allure of Mexican street food -- rough and honest and earthy. They are laced with the complementary spices of cross-cultural compassion and gringo guilt; and they go directly to the gut.

Lihosit spent a total of seven and a half years in Mexico and Central America, and from the feel of it, it was not a touristic enterprise. By his own account he grew close enough to the people of the several countries in which he lived to tip toe on the dangerous side of local politics. There is no question where his feelings fall with respect to repressive regimes and North American interference in Latin American affairs. There are not a lot of sympathetic norte americanos to be found here.

Lihosit wrote these stories some 25 years ago and recently decided to stir them up again. He adopted a personal conceit of modeling each after the work of a famous author, ranging from Faulkner to Garcia Marques -- not a modus operandi that would likely lead to consistency of style; and truth be told, the stew is a little lumpy. The mix is a rich one, however. The reader may choose to engage in his or her own literary guessing game -- and it's there for the playing -- but the reward here is in the guts of the stories, not in the stylistic artifice. Each one -- and they range from 6 to 68 pages -- describes a human involvement that is inextricably bi-cultural and convincingly grounded in its locale.

A trio of protestistas take a harrowing night-time car ride in support of a disintegrating popular cause. A naïve norteno achieves unintended and treacherous results with his academic game-playing. An island woodcarver is seduced away from his art by visitors and has to find his own, elegiac way back to his source. A failed salesman's son works out his own expiation through a sequence of tawdry encounters south of the border. These stories and their companions conjure up a rough world where damage is an inevitable byproduct of cross-cultural dalliance. As in Chinatown or Ballad of a Thin Man, what is happening here is seldom either intended or fully understood.

The stories are fiction, Lihosit is careful to explain in his preface, yet they have the unmistakable flavor of authenticity. His writing clearly springs from personal familiarity and observation; and his attitude is clearly grounded in personal experience. The cumulative effect is not an optimistic one; and yet Lihosit ends the collection gently, on a note of rebirth and hope. And with this choice he seems to achieve his own writer's redemption from the full weight of his subject matter.

Allen W. Fletcher's memoir of Senegal Heat, Sand and Friends is available by emailing him at afletcher@worcesterpublishing.com.

I thoroughly enjoyed this compilation of short stories from an author that I have had the pleasure to read in the past. This is however a different side of Lihosit that we see in these writings. He leaves his jocular Arizona cowboy style behind and delves into another facet of life in the land "south of the frontera." His fictional account of events, that one can only assume are based on reality, keeps you turning pages until the last word and wishing for more. The author's diverse life experiences have given him a deep well to draw from and he gives us a few of those tales in this volume. We can only hope that there will be more in the future.

Brian D. Wyllie (Author, "The Long Trip Home" A South American and Caribbean Adventure through the Past.)

Like fine wine, these stories by Lawrence Lihosit are savored for their complexity. The reader is transported south of the border to be immersed in the culture of an area the author calls Mesoamerica. Lihosit is a master of metaphor and vivid descriptions. As we travel along, it is easy to imagine the sights, sounds and smells of a particular location, "I walked until the blisters on the soles of my feet burst and my nose prickled from the sweet smell of heated corn tortillas."

The journey involves the reader in murder, unsavory politics, love lost, stolen cultural icons, and growing pains. At times the stories are rather on the dark side, but there are some lighter notes, especially in the final chapter (my favorite). One of the author's loveliest descriptions, "Outside the rain pinged like a reed flute alternating low and high notes...Nature's music harmonized with her breath and his toes which beat rhythm against the floor."

"Whispering Campaign" is a marvelous little collection by this former Peace Corps volunteer. The author claims these stories are all "bold-faced lies," but I suspect there is a grain of truth in each one. When the reader has savored all the details of Lawrence Lihosit's vignettes, one only hopes the author is busily brewing another batch.