Otto

by Lisa St. Aubin de Terán

I was born in 1934 in a little lost village near San Cristobel de Torondoy eleven months after my brother. Unlike him, who was astonishingly handsome, I was astonishingly ugly. I was covered in black hair from head to foot like some kind of monkey. For some reason my ear-drums burst within days of my birth. The local doctor told my mother ''This little boy is not going to live, and if he does, he's going to be daft or half-witted''. But against all the hopes of the family, it was my brother who died, and I survived.'
This extraordinary novel is based on a true story of a revolutionary who was advisor to Castro, friend of President Salvador Allende, and married to a woman who became one of the leaders of the Kurdish rebellion in Iran. There is a poignancy in his life, forever underlined by the leading roles thrown on him - like hoopla rings at a fair. Code-named Otto, he became an enemy of both the KGB and the CIA and all by chance, by a twist of fate, or by someone else's design. From the mountains of Venezuela, to the streets of Paris, from the heart of Cuba to rain-drenched London, this is a fabulous and picaresque journey of the lives and loves (plenty of those) of an astonishing man.

Genres: Fiction

512 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Lisa St. Aubin de Terán was born Lisa Rynveld in South London. She attended the James Allen's Girls' School. She married a Venezuelan landowner, Jaime Terán in 1971, at the age of 17, and became a farmer of sugar cane, avocados, pears, and sheep from 1972-1978.

Her second husband was the Scottish poet and novelist George MacBeth. After the marriage failed, she married painter Robbie Duff Scott and moved to Umbria, Italy.

In 1982, St. Aubin de Terán published her first novel, Keepers of the House. This novel was the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award. Her second novel, The Slow Train to Milan, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She received the Eric Gregory for Poetry in 1983. Her work includes novels, memoirs, poetry, and short-story collections.

St. Aubin de Terán has three children, including a daughter by her first husband, Iseult Teran, who is also a novelist.

She currently lives in Amsterdam with her partner Mees Van Deth, where she runs a film company and has set up the Terán Foundation in Mozambique.

Reviews

[Ali Miremadi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this out of curiosity about ‘Otto’, the character from ‘Slow Train to Milan’ which is a novel I have loved since my teens. I didn’t appreciate how close that earlier book was to a slice of autobiography. In ‘Otto’, de Teran tells an even more extraordinary true-life tale. It is a cliche for English language readers to perceive Latin America through a lens of magical realism - indeed de Teran stresses this throughout the text - but it is a terrific mode in which to describe a life such as Otto’s which begins in the Andes and takes him through the Socialist International period of Paris in 68, Algeria in the early days of independence, Castro’s newly ‘liberated’ Cuba, the death of Allende’s rule in Chile, Beijing/Peking and a brief but illuminating period in England. His growing disenchantment with communism through this period doesn’t imply any slackening of Otto’s hatred of US imperialism. Subsequent web searches show how fierce a critic of what the Chavez era has done to his home country of Venezuela. In a sense Otto’s life has been a disaster as he fruitlessly pursues a revolutionary dream which can only lead to catastrophe but he is such a vivid character and the story is told so well that the journey itself is worthwhile. Not sure if it sits better alongside the Marquez, Cortazar, Vargas Llosa and Fuentes texts which inform it or as a primer on the history of international socialism in the 60s and 70s, which is perhaps part of the virtue of this book.