Red, Yellow, Green

by Alejandro Saravia, María José Giménez (Translator)

In Montreal, Alfredo struggles with his memories of being ordered to commit an atrocity by the Bolivian army. Despising his nation as an oppressive sham, he falls for a woman who has no nation—a Kurdish freedom-fighter trying to blast an independent Kurdistan into existence. As the net of intrigue closes in on his lover, Alfredo must finally face his past. Refusing to be bound by style, genre, or language, Alejandro Saravia captures the tumultuous existence of the exile.

Genres: Fiction, Novels

200 pages, Paperback

Published October 24, 2017

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up in my search for Bolivian fiction available in English -- which there really isn't much of. I'm not sure what the Bolivian author's background is, but presumably he emigrated to Canada in the mid-1980s in response to the economic crises that the country was going through following decades of coups and dictatorships. The narrator of the book is also a Bolivian immigrant in Montreal, a former conscript whose existence is forever stained by his actions in the 1980 coup.

Originally published in 2003, the prose is a firehouse of overripe language and images bordering on stream of consciousness, along with occasional metatextual dialogue with the book's author ("The Scribe"). There's not much of a plot per se -- although the narrator meets a Kurdish woman and fixates on her in a desperate attempt to ground himself in the present, rather than his guilty past. While on a sentence-by-sentence basis there are wildly vivid and striking phrases and multilingual wordplay, none of it really cohered for me into anything I could connect with. It reads almost like a personal attempt at bibliotherapy, an attempt to write away the pain and the stain of nationhood.

The book ends with twelve brief poems -- and I later learned that the author is primarily a poet, which explains the relative richness of the language on display here, and the lack of plot. Readers with a taste for South American literature that takes on the personal in the political may get more out of this than I did.

Note: The book did provoke me into going down an internet rabbit-hole and learning that Klaus Barbie was directly involved in the highest echelons of Bolivian politics for years. And that led me down another internet rabbit-hole, including a US Department of Justice report outlining how the US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps was directly involved in getting him out of post-war Europe and to Bolivia.

[Benjamin Kahn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wasn't keen on this book. I knew from the first little bit that it wasn't my kind of book, but because it was a book club read, I felt duty-bound to finish it. It's more the style then the content - the back-and-forth between Montreal and Bolivia, the oh-so-clever author commenting on the writing of the book. It just didn't work for me.

There were a lot of important themes in this book, but I just wish the author had found another approach to doing it. Not a terrible book, just not my kind of book.