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摘要
摘要
After the Bombs is a coming of age story that holds a mirror up to the modern history of Guatemala--a funhouse mirror of richly inventive and farcical black comedy which provides a better description of life in that country than any history book ever could. It opens with the bombing of Guatemala City in 1954 when the hero, Max, is a small child. In a swiftly moving narrative, Max journeys toward adulthood, searching for his identity, for his father, and along the way, for the real Guatemala and the possibility of a society founded on human decency, after the bombs.
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
This powerful novel by the coauthor of the script for the film El Norte dissects the spirit of a country living through a nightmare. Based on the 1954 bombardment of Guatemala City by U.S. forces, it depicts Maximo, who comes of age in a world of corpse-littered streets, where the police are brigands, order is kept by random executions and the writing of books is a crime. At 13, Maximo falls in love with quirky Karen, daughter of the U.S. ambassador--until a case of mistaken identity leads to a violent, perverse attack on both of them. Against this sordid backdrop, he decides to become a writer--to ``build a cathedral of words''--and tell the story of his people's agony, and attempt to unravel the mystery of his father's long-ago disappearance. He meets the beautiful Amarena, a well-connected prostitute who becomes his lover, confidante and ally. At the lavish funeral of the local CIA chief, Maximo intrudes into the proceedings to read a story he's written exposing the horrors of Guatemala and lampooning U.S. officials. While he tries to escape the ensuing dragnet, Amarena comes to his rescue in an ending that adds a fillip of hope to a brutal, compelling morality tale. Author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
《书目》(Booklist)书评
In Guatemala City, young Maximo's search for the past (before the bombs) leads him to a discovery of words, long forbidden, and their power. Arias, coscriptor of the movie El Norte, tests this power by repeating, fragmenting, and stripping typical word structures in the telling of this coming-of-age narrative. Arias mixes comical absurdity with raw horror to form a disturbing, partially historic backdrop to his hero's search and to communicate the experience of living under military dictatorship. The experiments with words are generally effective, and this story is not only a carefully prepared feast for writers and readers, but also a sumptuous buffet of characters and situations in the Latin American traditions of naturalism, symbolism, and intellectualism. Highly recommended. ~--Angus Trimnell
Choice 评论
Modernity and politics are the style and substance of the new Latin American novel, but in this recent translation of Arturo Arias's Despues de las bombas (Mexico, 1979), it is difficult to know with which the author places his true allegiance. The clear stylistic markings of 20th-century artistic prose are present: metafictional transparencies ("He had to reconstruct that forgotten world even if it was only with words"), disjointed narrative, chaotic enumeration, the occluded narrator, woven leitmotifs (a pacifier, an artificial ear), ambiguous chronology, and, with a nod to Latin America's particular contribution, the astounding and absurdly comic juxtapositions of magical realism. But scenes of political torture and the continuing oracular divinations of an exquisite prostitute seem imitative and unskilled. Asa Zatz's translation is by no means incompetent; its smooth, colloquial flow reflects faithfully the author's attempt to depict a world before and after the bombs of the 1954 Guatemalan revolution, fragmentarily remembered by the child of early chapters, recounted with precision in later scenes. "I want to bring back those times. With words," remarks the ambitious narrator. And affectingly he does when he narrows the tale to a pinpoint of light shining on a baby carriage. But his depictions of political activists and the horrors they oppose are as homemade as a Molotov cocktail. Recommended for upper-division undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. B. L. Lewis Texas A & M University
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
Set against the 1954 coup in Guatemala (as the titular ``bombs'' indicate), this novel traces a young revolutionary's struggle for political truth that parallels the quest for his own identity as manifested by his frustrating search for his missing father. Overt symbolism, couched in caricature and violence, enlivens an otherwise anemic satiric vision. The tone derives its inspiration from Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch and especially from compatriot Asturias's El Senor Presidente (1963), neither of whose stylistic excellence or innovations it shares. A tepid recommendation for all but the strongest literature collections.-- Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC, Dublin, Ohio (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.