Tokoro’s Reviews > Heat of Passion > Status Update

"One thing I knew from the blood I inherited from my mother: the Portuguese don't forgive and forget. And they love a good blood feud...I wasn't the same person anymore. Angola had changed me. I didn't know what had happened to me in that ravaged land. Maybe working for a living changed a person."

'Four [women]?' 'You wouldn't begrudge a man two steaks would you?'...Who the hell was I to begrudge a starving man?"

A shame the books we don't want to are the ones running at an easy pace. This is why I'm not a businessman; too much run-around being done with communicative truth---don't tell it how it and provide clarity, find a nicer term for w/o being helpful. It shows on the business dealings and manner of communicating such here. Exploit or be exploited. Charity or health-care.

Got through the entire mere 20ish pages of part 5, POV Marni's (NGO aide worker and past relations with our protagonist) and her past/raising, seeing how much her mother suffered under the Mormon church's strictures of family and life expectations, become more and more mentally unstable. At first I misread it, husband's action for father's (strict, good Mormon vs backslid), as odd juxtaposition, but I caught myself.

Hard hitting as Malaya all the same.

"Countries are like people, Marni thought. They develop personalities and emotional distress, just as individuals do. They can go schizo like Germany did under the Nazis, paranoid like Russia under Stalin. Angola she saw as a beaten child, whipped and starved, raped and tortured, until it no longer knew what a normal existence was. Traumatized, the whole country acted psychotic

OK, progress. I got through the entirety of part 4---no matter how brief at close to 70 pages---just tonight, which is very good progress for a distracted reader like me. But distracted reader I remain, as with this page count, I could've finished another book.

"Funny---in America or Europe, people would threaten to call the police. In Angola, the threat is that you'll be murdered."

" 'Cross, one thing you need to learn in life, people are consistent. Losers never make it big. And achievers succeed at anything they try. Running a diamond mine isn't any more complicated than winning a race in a sailboat...What my old man taught me was that people are consistent. A thief is a thief is his whole life, even if he only indulges once. And an honest man doesn't steal.'

I like this internal narration of Liberte apprising the situation with his first visit and tours of the mine, as well as his managers of the it, whose characters he's attempting to pry out as well as explain the behavior of. This is a literary element I greatly appreciated in some choice books I read a decade ago: to trace the logic and thought process.

'Stealing at work was something shared w/your lover, not wife.'

We're privy to the narration of Liberte, and we get to see his silent process in judgment of character---asking after the clues of cognitive dissonance and apparent discrepancies, and what those mean for his management and business. This could almost be something of an MBA study.