26 January 2015

Review #132: Feast of the Innocents by Evelio Rosero Diago



My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
----Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Blanco, commonly known as Simón Bolívar, a Venezuelan military and political leader who played a key role in Latin America's successful struggle for independence from the Spanish Empire, and is today considered one of the most influential politicians in the history of the Americas.

Evelio Rosero Diago, a Colombian author, spun a remarkable tale about this notorious leader in the history of American politics- Simon Bolivar, in his book, La carroza de Bolívar , which is translated by Anne McLean, and Anna Milsom and the translated version is called, Feast of the Innocents.

Synopsis:
Doctor Justo Pastor Proceso López, adored by his female patients but despised by his wife and daughters, has a burning ambition: to prove to the world that the myth of Simón Bolívar, El Libertador, is a sham and a scandal.
In Pasto, south Colombia, where the good doctor plies his trade, the Feast Day of the Holy Innocents is dawning. A day for pranks, jokes and soakings … Water bombs, poisoned empanaditas, ground glass in the hog roast – anything goes.
What better day to commission a float for The Black and White Carnival that will explode the myth of El Libertador once and for all? One that will lay bare the massacres, betrayals and countless deflowerings that history has forgotten.
But in Colombia you question the founding fables at your peril. At the frenzied peak of the festivities, drunk on a river of arguardiente, Doctor Justo will discover that this year the joke might just be on him.



The story is set in San Juan de Pasto, which is the capital of the department of Nariño, located in southwestern Colombia. If you are a Colombian and have visited Pasto in the past, then this book might be an easy read for them, but those who don't know about Pasto or have never visited Pasto, for them this book will be a very difficult one to read. The author might have named all the cities in Pasto and about all the locations, but what he failed to do is the intricate detailing. Neither I felt I was transported to Pasto nor I felt the story belongs in Pasto. All the while I felt the story belongs in some ancient city of South America with a bunch of tongue-twisting names of places that I can't at all relate to. I never read anything so factual without any visual imagery descriptions of a particular location.

From the synopsis, it feels like the author has tried to capture the life and times of Simon Bolivar with another story. Unfortunately somewhere in the midway of the story, the author lost his track and ended up mixing both his stories in such a way that it feels like you're in a bad historical movie.

Honestly, I'm not much accustomed with the history of Liberator in America. But reading about it in this book, made me quite enlightened with this chapter of history. There is a gynecologist who is trying to show the real truth behind the Liberator by writing the autobiography of Simon Bolivar. And then on the other hand, there is the story of Bolivar whose evil acts were contradicted by the historian, José Rafael Sanudo, thus arousing national anger with his published works about Bolivar. Bolivar had always been an evil politician in the face of the Liberator who commanded the first slaughter of civilians in Colombia. The author Rosero wrote this book with the aim to vindicate the memory of José Rafael Sanudo, in the form of a doctor who builds a chariot in memory of Bolivar pulled by twelve princesses during the Carnival in Pasto, thus enraging the people of Pasto.

I believe it's not an easy thing to mix history with literature, if not done skillfully, might turn into something very dull and monotonous. And since Rosero chose Bolivar as his subject in his book, it was not an easy job to project that politician without any rigorous historical facts and data. And that is the one reason for which the narration felt kind of inarticulate and at times, I had to read twice so as to understand the story. The prose is fine, crisp yet filled with dark humor and comics. The characters are really brilliant, the doctor and his pastusos friends, his family, his daughters and his elegant and controversial wife. Their story is what I really liked a lot and how the author tried to mend a broken marriage with his story.

Verdict: A nice historical tale about Simon Bolivar and I can accept the fact that the author has truly and gratefully paid tribute to Simon Bolivar. If you want to read about Bolivar's history filled with a tale of a bad marriage set in Pasto, then go for it without thinking about the consequences.

Courtesy: Thanks to the TripFiction team for giving me an opportunity to read and review this book. 
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Author Info: 
Evelio Rosero Diago was born in Bogotá, Colombia, on March 20, 1958. He is a Colombian writer and journalist, who reached international acclaim after winning in 2006 the prestigious Tusquets Prize.
Evelio Rosero studied primary school in Colombia’s southern city of Pasto, and high school in Bogotá, where he later attended Universidad Externado de Colombia obtaining a degree in Journalism. When he was 21, he won Colombia’s Premio Nacional de Cuento del Quindío 1979 (National Short Story Award of Quindío), for his piece Ausentes (The Departed) that was published by Instituto Colombiano de Cultura in the book 17 Cuentos colombianos (17 Colombian Short Stories). In 1982 he was awarded with the Premio Iberoamericano de Libro de Cuentos Netzahualcóyotl, in Mexico City for his earlier stories, and that same year, a novella under the title Papá es santo y sabio (Dad is holy and wise) won Spain’s Premio Internacional de Novela Breve Valencia. After these early successess, Rosero fled to Europe and lived first in Paris and later in Barcelona.
His first novel in 1984 was Mateo Solo (Mateo Alone), which began his trilogy known as Primera Vez (First Time). Mateo Solo is a story about a child confined in his own home. Mateo knows about the outside world for what he sees through the windows. It is a novel of dazzling confinement, where sight is the main character: his sister, his aunt, his nanny all play their own game while allowing Mateo to keep his hope for identity in plotting his own escape.
With his second book in 1986, Juliana los mira (Juliana is watching), Evelio Rosero was translated into Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and German to great acclaim. Once again, the visual experience of a child, this time a girl, builds the world of grownups and family, unveiling all the brutality and meanness of adults as seen with her ingenuousness. Juliana’s world is her own house and family. As Juliana watches her parents and relatives, she builds them. Her sight alters objects as she contemplates them. This was the first book where Rosero involved other themes from Colombia’s tragical reality such as kidnapping, presented here as a permanent threat that in the end justifies Juliana’s own confinement.
In 1988, El Incendiado (The Burning Man) was published. With this book, Rosero obtained a Proartes bachelor in Colombia and won in 1992 the II Premio Pedro Gómez Valderrama for the most outstanding book written between 1988 and 1992. The novel tells the stories of a group of teenagers from a famous school in Bogotá, Colegio Agustiniano Norte, denouncing the education taught by the priest headmasters as “fool, arcaic, troglodite and morbid”.
To date, he has written nine novels, beginning with Señor que no conoce luna in 1992 and Cuchilla in 2000 which won a Norma-Fundalectura prize. Plutón (Pluto) published also in 2000, Los almuerzos (The lunches) in 2001, Juega el amor in 2002 and Los Ejércitos, which won in 2006 the prestigious 2nd Premio Tusquets Editores de Novela and also won in 2009 the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize organized by the British newspaper The Independent.
Evelio Rosero currently lives in Bogotá. In 2006 he won Colombia’s Premio Nacional de Literatura (National Literature Prize) awarded in recognition of a life in letters by the Ministry of Culture. His work has been translated into a dozen European languages.
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