24  Guatemala – After the bombs – Arturo Arias (Score 3.00)

This is a strange book, telling the story of a young boy growing to be a young man over the years following a terrifying bombardment by planes from an unidentified enemy of Guatemala City. We only find out who the enemy was very close to the end of the book.

I find it very difficult to comment meaningfully on the style of writing, so I can do no better than repeat a quotation from “The Village Voice Literary Supplement” given on the back cover of my copy of the book.

“After the Bombs is a sort of bildungsroman run riot. Arias mixes stream-of-consciousness, lyrical outbursts, Marx Brothers antics, a nuanced poetic sense of rhythm in his sentence construction, funky gossip and myth, all with a fine sense of theatricality.”

Make what you will of that. I know that I would not envy the translator his task. I wouldn’t even think of tackling this one in Spanish.

Near the beginning we learn that the unnamed husband is probably a Basque nationalist when he shouts out “Viva Euskadi” on entering the Bar Madrid after work.

The, equally unidentified, wife is taking the baby for a walk. The baby cries continuously from the pain of the pustules caused by hives which the doctors cannot cure. The bombing of Guatemala City starts and goes on for hours, the dive-bombers in wave after wave unleashing their bombs, bringing death, destruction and terror.

The woman reaches home, and takes shelter with the baby under a heavy table. Eventually the bombing stops.

There is a new government.

We learn that the baby is Máximo Sánchez. At some indeterminate time after the bombs, when he has grown a bit, he is walking through the still deserted and derelict streets. He is now four and a half. There may be some dichotomy in time. There are still bodies and body parts lying about amid the rubble. There seems to have been no government action to clear up, or to bury the dead from the bombing.

The end of Chapter 2 “Funeral for a bird” reminds me of “The Storyteller” by the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. The old man here tells Max about the war against the invading Spanish which the Quiche lost, along with their culture, their cities and their freedom.

The book continues in a zany style of writing which fully extracts the Michael from that period of the history of Guatemala.

I persevered with it, against my better judgement, since I don’t like giving up on a book, but I skimmed about the last fifty pages. There is a story, but it is very difficult to track it down in the weird writing. I really can’t recommend “After the Bombs”, and could only score it at 4/10.