I do my best to avoid jacket copy when choosing a book, preferring to work with fellow reader recomendations and the first line of randomly chosen volumes. Although, I entered my local bookstore with purpose and did not rely on either for the purchase of this particular novel I am still fond of its first line. "In the beginning were the howlers." The novel begins as the diary of a young boy in 1929 and follows him through to 1951. Harrison Shepherd was born in the United States and whisked off to Mexico by his native mother at the age of twelve. The novel begins with Mexico and as I read I thought I was going to read a history of Mexico. Instead Harrison Shepherd becomes the Forest Gump of Communism. I particularly enjoyed her look at the Red Scare in the United States
"Communism? Most people have no idea what it is . . . I do not exaggerate. Look
around this restaurant, ask any of these fine citizens. 'Excuse me, sir, I've
been thinking of an idea, a bunch of working people owning the means of their
own production. What do you make of that?' You know, he might be all for it."
Barbara Kingsolver has never been politically inactive in her writing and I feel like many of her points particularly in those scenes occuring in the United States speak directly to where our nation is today and the new dirty word is socialism.
Most of the characters in this novel speak in some sort of dialect, but Shepherd speaks English with the poetry of Spanish grammar. He makes odd word choices and plays with sentence structure in a way that makes the book all the more visually stimulating.
My favorite passage by far:
"Your blood for mine. If not these, then those. War is the supreme
mathematics problem. It strains our skulls, yet we work out the sums, believing
we have pressed the monstrous quantities into a balanced
equation."
This book was an amazing way to begin a new decade.
Happy New Year, and welcome to my year (maybe decade if I find this enjoyable) in books.
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