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Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War Hardcover – February 1, 2011
| Deb Olin Unferth (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Rising literary star Deb Olin Unferth offers a new twist on the coming-of-age memoir in this utterly unique and captivating story of the year she ran away from college with her Christian boyfriend and followed him to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas.
Despite their earnest commitment to a myriad of revolutionary causes and to each other, the couple find themselves unwanted, unhelpful, and unprepared as they bop around Central America, looking for "revolution jobs." The year is 1987, a turning point in the Cold War. The East-West balance has begun to tip, although the world doesn't know it yet, especially not Unferth and her fiancé (he proposes on a roadside in El Salvador). The months wear on and cracks begin to form in their relationship: they get fired, they get sick, they run out of money, they grow disillusioned with the revolution and each other. But years later the trip remains fixed in her mind and she finally goes back to Nicaragua to try to make sense of it all. Unferth's heartbreaking and hilarious memoir perfectly captures the youthful search for meaning, and is an absorbing rumination on what happens to a country and its people after the revolution is over.
- Print length224 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHenry Holt and Co.
- Publication dateFebruary 1, 2011
- Dimensions5.82 x 0.84 x 8.59 inches
- ISBN-100805093230
- ISBN-13978-0805093230
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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Review
"This is a very funny, excoriatingly honest story of being young, semi-idealistic, stupid and in love. If you have ever been any of these things, you'll devour it."--Dave Eggers
"Deb Olin Unferth is one of the most ambitious and inspirational writers working today. Her memoir of idealistic, bewildered people-in-training befell me like a fever for which, I'm happy to report, there appears to be no cure. An encounter with Unferth's prose is to be permanently, wondrously afflicted by its genius."--Heidi Julavits, author of The Uses of Enchantment
"Revolution is the best of many worlds: misconceived youth, sharp humor and sharper characters, and mostly, for me, the chance to witness a brand of paragraph-to-paragraph artistry that is much too rare."--John Brandon, author of Citrus County
"Brave, soulful...Unferth has a distinct, droll voice. Reading her is like listening to a girlfriend burning with gin-fueled enlightenment."--The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice Pick)
Revolution calls itself a memoir, but it's something altogether stranger and more dazzling: It's a virtuosic one-woman show....It's smart, stylish, compulsive reading: memoir at its best."--Time Out New York"Unferth writes with a sly, understated appreciation for the absurd...A dryly humorous memoir of love, travel and wide-eyed idealism."--Kirkus
"This clearheaded and funny memoir captures the grit and chaos of a tumultuous moment in Central American history, but it's really a coming-of-age story...[Unferth] didn't become a revolutionary, but she did become a grown-up."--Mother Jones“Unferth’s application of her imagination to her subject…evokes what David Forster Wallace referred to as ‘the click,’ a feeling one gets when reading work that’s firing on all cylinders.”--Bookforum
"Hers is a bildungsromanfor the Believer set, a portrait of the artist as a young and clueless revolutionary."--The New York Observer
"Unferth's prose remains as sure and slicing as a machete, clearing a path through a jungle of emotions...A memoir of unique lucidity, wit, and power."--BooklistAbout the Author
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the story collection Minor Robberies and the novel Vacation, winner of the 2009 Cabell First Novelist Award and a New York Times Book Review Critics' Choice. Her work has been featured in Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Believer, and the Boston Review. She has received two Pushcart Prizes and a 2009 Creative Capital grant for Innovative Literature. She teaches at Wesleyan University and currently lives in New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Part One
The New World
McDonald's
I had food in my heart and mind that morning. My parents had said they'd pick George and me up at the border and take us anywhere we wanted to eat. I wanted to go to McDonald's. My father thought that was funny. Part of his story for a long time was how the first place I wanted to go when I came back from fomenting the Communist revolution was McDonald's. Hey, to me at that moment, McDonald's looked pretty good. We'd seen McDonald's in Mexico, of course, and Honduras and other places, but we hadn't been able to afford it. Now, approaching the border, I was thinking about that lighted menu board. I was thinking about how I already knew what the food I ordered would look like. I knew what the French fries would look like, what the containers would look like, although I'd never been to that particular McDonald's. I knew what I'd get when I got a sundae. That seemed like a neat and attractive trick to me now. There would be toilet paper in the bathrooms. And soap. There were the little songs on TV, the McDonald's songs that people all over the world knew and I had sung when I was a kid, the Big Mac chant, the Hamburglar. George was asleep beside me, had slept through the last seven hours of desert. "George, wake up," I said. "We're going to McDonald's."
Popular Priest
My boyfriend and I went to join the revolution.
We couldn't find the first revolution.
The second revolution hired us on and then let us go.
We went to the other revolutions in the area—there were several—but every one we came to let us hang around for a few weeks and then made us leave.
We ran out of money and at last we came home.
I was eighteen. That's the whole story.
George and I were walking through a shantytown. Two weeks into Mexico, the beginning of our trip, and we were outside Mexico City. An American priest walked ahead. He was saying hello to people and taking their hands. He was saying good-bye to them and waving. Que te vaya bien. Adiós. Dios te bendiga. They chimed back. We walked a long way, following this priest.
It was 1987, and at that time these little liberation theology institutes were set up all over Latin America, "popular churches," they were called, short chapels with small gardens, places for people to get together and help usher in the revolution. The priests were in charge and they could be from anywhere—South America, Spain, the States—but most were from down the street. We liked to drop in when we found these setups. We interviewed whoever happened to be hanging around and we borrowed books from their shelves and got the people to take us out. We liked to get the scoop.
So we'd met this priest at his instituto and he'd brought us to the shantytown. He was doing some work, fixing up some floors. He thought we just might like to see.
When you think of a shantytown, you imagine a few square blocks of board and tin, some chickens running through, but it's a whole city, a thousand thin paths, kilometers and kilometers of housewives standing outside askew miniature-sized houses, not a window pane in sight, the air moist and buzzing.
"These people are born and die here," the priest was telling us. "They have no way to get out." He raised his hand to show us where they had to stay.
"Well, at least they've got their little houses," I said. I was impressed with how tidy it all was. "Some have less than that."
The priest looked over at me.
Then he was gone. Just like that. Left George and me standing by a flower of electrical cords coming out of a pole.
We waited a while. Roosters called to each other in the distance. Then we started puzzling around the shacks, trying to find our way back. We were soon lost. We felt stupid and rude walking along, a couple of idiot gringos slapping at the mosquitoes and grinning. We were sad about the priest. Why had he gone away? He'd left us and we deserved it. We'd been bad-mannered. I'd been bad-mannered, according to George. George knew better than to say a thing like that. Oh yeah? I said. Then why had the priest left George here with me?
These priests for the liberation. You did not want to mess with them. Latin America was swinging to the left, hoisted on pulleys by these radical priests, and some said the Vatican was to blame. In 1962 the pope had summoned the world's bishops to Rome for the Vatican Two Council, to talk about how to renew the Church, how to be relevant to the laypeople. The story goes that the bishops met each fall for four years. They talked about things like how perhaps they should not say mass in Latin anymore because no one understood it (although the entire conference took place in Latin). Some of the South American bishops and priests thought that one way to renew the Church was to organize the lay into groups, maybe even guerrilla armies, and then rise up and overthrow their governments. Soon a continent of priests was storing weapons and reading Marx in the name of Vatican Two. They turned their churches into revolutionary enclaves and invited students to come live in them like a herd of hippies. Some priests held secret meetings with guerrilla rebels. Some manned radio frequencies that kept tabs on the national guard. And when the skirmishes began, some priests came out shooting. Every day their chapels filled with citizens, and the priests never stopped talking about Vatican Two, the theology of liberation, how the Church was a socialist soldier for the poor, and how grateful they were for this mandate from God. Of course the pope didn't mean to produce an infantry of gun-touting South American priests, and he said so, but it was too late.
Late for the pope, but early for George and me. This priest was the first of his kind, we'd found. We walked, lost, through the shantytown. Houses tacked up to each other with clothes hangers, a cobweb of roofs held down with tires. Outhouses winged out over the river. Lightless rooms, cardboard town. We began getting upset at seeing how poor the people were, now that we were looking more carefully. Ladies and kids stopped us and pointed in different directions, laughing behind their hands. A few folks followed us. We handed out all of our bills. We didn't see how we would ever find our way back. George was taking us in circles. Oh, right, he said, he was taking us in circles, perfect. We began to panic.
Suddenly the priest was there, stepped out in front of us. Ho ho. He'd stopped in to look at a floor he and some friends had put in. Lost track of us.
What, had we been nervous about getting stuck here? he wondered. About not being able to get out?
"Okay, okay, we get it already," we said, though we did not.
Excerpted from Revolution by Deb Olin Unferth
Copyright 2011 by Deb Olin Unferth
Published in 2011 by Henry Holt and Company
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.
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Product details
- Publisher : Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition (February 1, 2011)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0805093230
- ISBN-13 : 978-0805093230
- Item Weight : 12 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.82 x 0.84 x 8.59 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,521,999 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #12,141 in Travelogues & Travel Essays
- #20,402 in Traveler & Explorer Biographies
- #105,069 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of six books, including two novels, a memoir, two story collections, and a graphic novel. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, The Paris Review, Granta, Vice, and McSweeney’s. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. An associate professor at the University of Texas in Austin, she also is the director of the Pen City Writers, a creative-writing program at a south Texas penitentiary.
Customer reviews
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I totally relate to this book and had similar ideas of my own to go join the Revolution. My boyfriend (who later became my husband, then my ex) was Salvadoran so he knew it was no joking matter to go join a guerrilla group or any other group during the civil wars in Central and South America.
We even had some friends who were in a punk rock band that went to Nicaragua after the Revolution. The more I heard, the more I wanted to go. I finally did go to El Salvador, but my boyfriend's family made sure I didn't get into any really bad situations.
It's interesting that of all the people I met who had been to Nicaragua, not one of them told me the raw truth that Unferth tells here. I had no idea that it would have been so difficult! Yes, I knew there were very young soldiers who were indoctrinated to believe anyone who cared about the people were Communists (this was how it was in El Salvador). I knew that the Sandinistas were mostly young idealists who knew what hunger and violence was like (El Salvador too, that's how both sides were able to recruit so many teens). But I never knew about the day to day difficulties of lack of food, money and jobs, and the abundance of diseases that could KILL you!
Unferth bares her soul like few have done, especially as it relates to Central America, idealists and trying to understand another culture.
One of my favorite facts that Unferth brings up is that the locals didn't call us American and European idealists "Internationalistas," but instead referred to us (or them, since I didn't go) as "Sandalistas" because of the fact that almost all of them wore some kind of sandals! They may have arrived in Birkenstocks, but eventually had to wear whatever some local shoemaker with no resources could make for them.
I must admit that the novel made me very glad that my headstrong Salvadoran boyfriend never gave in to the silly whims of an American girl who, at that time, romanticized the entire idea of helping poor people make a better life for themselves. It truly was NO JOKE. Knowing me, I might not have made it back alive!
Sherrie Miranda is the author of "Secrets & Lies in El Salvador: Shelly's Journey"
P.S. I should note that the book I read had a different (more appropriate) cover. I don't know if there were many changes made to this edition.
It's 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas have deposed the Somoza family but struggle to feed their people and hold back the Contras. The bloody civil war in El Salvador is approaching its crisis. Honduran and Guatemalan death squads routinely gun down campesinos in the mountains, insisting they are insurgents. Manuel Noriega is el presidente of Panama--for a little while longer.
"Dear Mom and Dad," Debbie writes from Nogales, Texas. "I'm sorry to tell you in this way, but I've left school and am going to help foment the revolution. I am a Christian now and I have been called by God. Due to the layout of the land, we are taking the bus."
Please read the rest of this review at [...]
I found the cluelessness to be ultimately boring and bewildering, and since I didn't learn anything about Nicaragua or anywhere else she went in this slim and frivolous book, I can't recommend it.
When I noticed that the author is now teaching at Wesleyan, my first thought was, "My God, this person is now teaching our children?" Hopefully she has learned a lot in the intervening years.
Her revolutionary period didn't involve fighting but lots of short stints of being domestic help since some one needs to help the kids displaced by war. Her recounting of helping in an orphanage is truly inspired. She decides that she will help the kids learn to speak English and farm. All noble ideals except the she doesn't know enough Spanish to teach them English and the kids know more than her about gardening. She buys flower seeds instead of vegetables. This is a very wonderful read for anyone who wished they ran away to rebel, but didn't have the guts. I received this book from the publisher at no expense in exchange for my honest review.






