The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War (Paperback)

~ (Author) "WITH EACH SHOT I fired my body shuddered, the impact reverberating through every last joint, leaving an unbearable ringing in my head, sharp and disturbing..." (more)
Key Phrases: United States, Costa Rica, San Jos (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Belli's upper-class Nicaraguan family was unsympathetic to the Somoza dictatorship, but would have been shocked to learn that their 20-something daughter was joining the underground Sandinistas even as she worked her bourgeois day job at a prestigious advertising agency. This lush memoir follows Belli from her sterile marriage to her first affair, from her first published poem to her first subversive act, and then through a series of exiles, until her triumphant return to her liberated homeland... only to face another struggle to liberate her own heart. The account is both intensely personal and informatively political. Belli (The Inhabited Woman) was no mere sympathizer or mistress to a compa¤ero but an active militant and strategist in her own right. She smuggled weapons, ran roadblocks, formed factions with revolutionary tendencies, argued strategy with Castro and represented liberated Nicaragua at Third World conferences from Moscow to Tripoli. An honest, insider's account of the very real debates surrounding this major revolution would be valuable in itself, but Belli offers more: a frank examination of her own struggle for love. Only after a series of disastrous affairs does she realize she must stop adjusting herself to how she expects her lover will react and just be herself. Next to the monumental upheavals of the Sandinistan revolution, such personal revelations may seem minor, but to Belli and her companeras, the battle was only half won if women were again relegated to mistress-to-the-mighty status. Belli shares her story in some 50 brief chapters, each subtitled to foreshadow content-an oddly reassuring format. 8 pages of photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Belli, author of the acclaimed novel The Inhabited Woman (1994), could have simply enjoyed the benefits of upper-class Nicaraguan life as a young wife and mother, but privileged domesticity could not contain her questing spirit. She soon launched a successful advertising career in Managua, found her soul mates among writers and revolutionaries, and became both a celebrated poet and a Sandinista, risking her life in her country's fight for freedom. Belli's dramatic and heroic story is an epic of liberation both personal and communal, and she chronicles her harrowing experiences with magnetic candor and lithe lyricism, sharing her insider's view of the Sandinistas' hard-won, tragically brief victory and the wrenching anguish of their annihilation thanks to Reagan and Bush and the Iran-Contra debacle. Motherhood and love affairs under fire, gun running and media work, poetry prizes and exile, and ceaseless combat against misogyny and despair, Belli's powerfully told story reveals the symbiotic give-and-take of body and soul, art and politics, and altruism and pragmatism that make up the human continuum. A tribute to beauty, valor, and justice, Belli's giving and clarion book is also an antidote to fear and apathy, and a reminder that freedom is always a work in progress. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (October 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400032164
• ISBN-13: 978-1400032167
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #136,826 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well told story of Dona Quixote of Nicaragua, January 5, 2004

By	Stacey M Jones (Conway, Ark.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War (Hardcover)

I was reminded while reading COUNTRY by Belli of a passage early in Rebecca West's BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON in which she writes that men suffer from lunacy of being too much of the world, and women suffer from being too local, too involved in their own personal lives. Belli does not suffer either, but rather finds a balance in her narration between the concerns of her worldly life with the concerns of her personal life. She recounts in similar voice the dramas of her involvement with the Sandinistas and her rise in the eventual government the rebel group achieved and the complications of her personal life as her first marriage and then her second crumbled.

She writes about herself as a Doña Quixote, seeking to make the world a better place, and having her own adventures, and the titles of each chapter charmingly advance this thematic idea, having a similar style to Cervantes' work (which I am reading now). For example, chapter 22 is titled, "On the hectic preparations for the attacks and on how I was unexpectedly called to perform a dangerous mission." Belli gives a compelling account in these chapters of the egregious human rights violations of the Somoza dictatorship that the Sandinistas sought to overthrow. The reader is walked through her early life, the daily life of a privileged Nicaraguan who felt a moral imperative to make a change in the government of her country. She also recounts her feelings about the Reagan administration's support of the Contras who sought to overthrow the Sandinista government. The actions of the United States, according to Belli in COUNTRY, were illustrative of why the United States is not universally beloved. This empire had a personal and profound impact on the author, who now lives in the United States part of the time with her third husband.

Belli is an accomplished poet and writer, and it shows in her work. She draws the picture of her life clearly and vividly, not falling prey to the "telling not showing" disease many nonwriters have when they seek to illustrate their own lives.

Belli writes with heartbreak of how the Sandinistas lost the election soon after they effected the end of the Somoza regime, but it is touching and shows the lasting legacy of the Sandinista revolution: It gave Nicaraguans the right to vote for their own leaders.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Power of Passion, May 29, 2003

By	"darahalperin" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War (Hardcover)

The Power of Passion in Gioconda Belli's
The Country Under My Skin

The passions of womanhood must be God's greatest gift to humanity. If every woman would stand up and cultivate this treasure, each in her own way and with her individual talents, they could generate the inherent wisdom, power and goodness of their passions into peace. It is improbable that it could be world peace, and yet, the somehow more profound and practical inner peace is what those women would treasure most. If there was any doubt that this was possible, it was completely dispelled after journeying through Gioconda Belli's remarkable memoir, The Country Under My Skin.

Hers is a tale of passion told through the guises of love, patriotism, motherhood, poetry and war. She introduces herself as the protected, educated daughter of respectable, bourgeois parents who would be more comfortable at a country club than at a secret meeting of subversive revolutionaries. But it is not long before she begins to reveal how she started as one and became the other. Each chapter tunnels further into what makes her tick, where those passions come from and how they develop from a wild, immature spark into the ardent beliefs and controlled fire of her immense passions. She may be intense, but nobody would accuse Belli of being wishy-washy.

She takes us on a journey of self-discovery, showing us the important people and events that shaped her. From such notable personalities as Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, and the flurry of other well known artists, writers, subversives, and politicians she introduces, to the intimate intricacies of her own family, Belli's characters help define her. In a haunting and poignant way, what she finds in herself reveals that which all women possess: the passions of womanhood. It is this passion that forces her to face the reality of life in Nicaragua and make a choice to accept the striking chasms between affluence and poverty, high ideals and censorship, freedom and tyranny. Once her choice has been made, there is no turning back: that would mean denying the possibilities of her dreams and those passions. Once she chooses the Sandanista cause, the framework for her tale has been laid.

It is through the eyes of the revolutionary that we meet the mother, the poet, the friend, the lover and the woman that is Gioconda Belli. This unique perspective affords the reader the insight to understand how she can be all of these things without being a contradiction to herself. A young mother who puts her family at risk under a totalitarian dictatorship by joining the forces for change, it may seem a strange choice to make. In her view, the responsibility she had to her children was to provide for them a better world to live in than the one she inherited. In other words, how could she accept her position in society and ignore what she knew to be right? I don't think she could have and I am glad she didn't.

This is the legacy of Belli: she leads by example. Not that every debutante should pick up an AK-47 and support armed resistance for a cause, but that each woman should find her passion and use that strength to power her dreams and actions for a better future. Her story is one of conflict: the external forces of war and the internal turmoil of choices amid the stark realities of life. This inner struggle exposes the most tender, vulnerable side of the warrior. In the stories of her three marriages, her four children, and the several lovers in between, there is a moving honesty in her voice that is unafraid of critique or of other people's values. She may question her motives and tenacity, but in her effort to resolve these forces, we see our own choices and cannot condemn hers.

It is this very honesty that allows us to accept her choices and not judge her actions. Through her rich language and haunting descriptions we come to feel her longings, understand her not just as a revolutionary and poet, but also in a more complete way, as a woman. This transformation does not follow any plot or storyline. It is how we discover ourselves in her words. In the most haunting passage of her tale, she leaves the cerebral world of thought and logic behind to describe how she felt after having chosen to terminate a pregnancy:

"I still remember the emptiness I felt on the flight home to Nicaragua, like a gutted house with only its façade left standing. For many years I cried over what could have been. I suffered for every woman who has ever found herself torn by life-or-death decisions, decisions that are our right, but that forever leave a bomb crater in our hearts, a disaster zone where the ghost of a child wanders, laughing the laughter that never was, forever gazing at us wistfully for the life we denied it."

These are the words of anguish. They are the personal, lonely torment of her choice. In the true spirit of art, she transcends her own words and is inspired to channel the
ineffability of emotion. The ability to infuse words with the feelings and passions that encompass her is her greatest gift, to herself and her readers.

The author of four novels and several collections of poetry, Gioconda Belli encapsulates the power and passions of womanhood. The Country Under My Skin, subtitled "a memoir of love and war" is far more than that. It is the portrait of a woman whose choices and determination exceed the expectations of her position, her gender, and herself. What she has accomplished in those reminiscences is nothing short of exceptional and has provided a guide for personal growth, intimate introspection, sublime description, and intense integrity that will serve as a role model for all women wishing to capture and empower themselves with the force of their own passions.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Political Made Personal, September 19, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War (Hardcover)

Belli's extraordinary memoir brings intimacy, emotional sensitivity, and depth to the story of Nicaragua's revolution. Whether she is giving birth in a squalid clinic, exiled from her country, learning to shoot, being dropped from a helicopter - in high heels - or negotiating with Fidel, we never forget she and the other revolutionaries are all people struggling to live, to love, to raise their children, care for their parents, and save their country all at once. Never before have I read a political memoir that told me what I wanted to know about revolution - not just the events and the speeches, the strategies and the fights, but how it felt, how one lived it, what kind of person Fidel was, Ortega, and the rest. Belli tells the tale with all its drama, but doesn't leave out the profoundly complex personal texture.