THE WAR OF DON EMMANUEL'S NETHER PARTS

Latin American Trilogy

by Louis de Bernières

The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts:

Genres: Fiction, Magical Realism, Humor, Contemporary, Historical Fiction, Fantasy, Literary Fiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Louis de Bernières is an English novelist. He is known for his 1994 historical war novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin. In 1993 de Bernières was selected as one of the "20 Best of Young British Novelists", part of a promotion in Granta magazine. Captain Corelli's Mandolin was published in the following year, winning the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. It was also shortlisted for the 1994 Sunday Express Book of the Year. It has been translated into over 11 languages and is an international best-seller.
On 16 July 2008, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in the Arts by the De Montfort University in Leicester, which he had attended when it was Leicester Polytechnic.
Politically, he identifies himself as Eurosceptic and has voiced his support for the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union.

Reviews

[Kevin Ansbro · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first of Louis de Bernières’ Latin American threesome (I once read Señor Vivo and the Coco Lord without realising that it was the second book in the trilogy ¡Ay, caramba! -not that it really matters).

In homage to Gabriel García Márquez, the godfather of magical realism, de Bernières serves up a rhapsodic, riotous, rollicking (and any number of adjectives beginning with ’r’) snortfest of salacious surrealism (it seems I’m bedevilled by alliteration today).
It would take me all day to explain a storyline that encompasses a depraved army, an offbeat band of guerrillas and a fiesta of frivolity (I’m bloody at it again with the alliteration; it’s getting on my nerves).
Perhaps I shouldn’t have read the second book first because I felt that this one paled in comparison.
It is, nevertheless, a hugely enjoyable read.

[Fabian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the type of book I really relish: Epic, with myriad POVs &, therefore, too, a plethora of characters: satirical, tragicomic. How can somebody possibly populate this South American Question Mark of a Town? de Bernieres is on the same line as Tolkien and John Kennedy Toole-- his characters are fleshy and complicated. The war is fought at many angles and everybody has a part to play.

Don Emmanuel makes a "Queen-Elizabeth-in-"Shakespeare in Love""-like cameo (Dame Judy Dench... in all her splendor), & yet his name is bestowed upon the title; not Remedios, the Guevaraesque woman, the main revolutionary, nor her fellow guerillas (all of which are underdogs and Suffer, yet constantly fight for freedom as in all the best of narratives). It is not "Dona Costanza's Sexual Awakening". It is not "Holocaust in the Tropics". It has a silly, quirky title, and it is exactly this: a silly, quirky novel. It is also relevant, it is bittersweet, it is complex. It is more than one thinks it is. It would fit perfectly with "Slumdog"... dead serious, yet heartfelt to the nth degree (the atrocious rapes and killings are dispersed among vignettes of intense happiness and the unification of native peoples).

There is also the clever prose, the important pseudo-irrelevancies, the constant flights of fancy. De Bernieres obviously has much fun inventing.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is serious and poignant; this more modern storyteller has a larger sense of humor and takes a less direct approach with symbolism; the population of the little besieged town is all of a sudden plagued with cats: the townspeople care about them and integrate them into their rural lives. The cats then become panthers... though there is an obvious exodus, there is, too, a return to a mother land. Oh yes- & according to the Santa figure that is the jolly Don Emmanuel, a cure for the war is... yes, sex. How more simple can it get in its complexity?

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn’t resist tapping into the early work of an author who flashed like a comet into my reading pleasure with his delightful and stirring “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” (1994) and “Birds Without Wings” (2004). While the former delved into a Greek island community invaded by Italians in World War 2. the latter rendered a portrait of a multicultural community in Anatolia shaken from death throes of the Ottoman empire and World War 1. Here our ensemble cast is from a village in some nameless South American country, spanning the range from peasants of native, black, or mixed races to wealthy immigrants, socialites, corporate oligarchs, and army members of various ranks. The former wends their way toward revolution against oppression and exploitation by the latter. Happily, there is some real character development and a fairy tale touch as folks of many walks of life end up working toward some utopian freedom by the end.

Some of the main characters include Don Emanuel , a wealthy landowner turning playboy and hippie, Dona Constanza Evans, the hauty but lusty wife of an oligarch, Aurelio, an orphan from ranching peons who gets empowered by a Native tribe in the rain forest, and Remedios, a female guerilla leader with a chip on her shoulder after sustaining the torture deaths of her parents as a girl. All these characters get nudged into changing their ways starting with an atrocity committed by one Sergeant Figueros, starting with an attempted rape of a beloved village girl and then escalating to a hand-grenade assault on a crowd. Rebel forces hiding in the mountains start gaining more forces, and they get bold enough to kidnap first Dona Constanza and then the general high in the government’s military command, General Fuertas. It turns out that Constanza likes the cut of one young rebel’s jib and that the general is sympathetic to the group’s despair over the corruption and brutality of soldiers like Figueros, which the general wasn’t aware of. The collective finds less brutal ways of fighting back against the government (poisonous spiders placed in tents, releasing caimen in the night, fake ghost hauntings) and grow their hope for autonomy somewhere remote from government reach.

This plot schema would not seem to not leave much opening for satire and humor. Much lies in the dialog among his well-crafted characters and its content of constant clashing between world views. The whole society is in a pathetic situation of suffering civil wars that have killed nearly 200,000 people, with little change in the situation of Liberal and Conservative politicians changing administrations every few years without touching the power of corrupt and greedy business leaders and their reins on the military. This picture seem close to the reality for many countries in South America.

The oligarchy was a large network of immensely rich landowners, descended from the conquistadors, who had been illiterate robber barbarians who had destroyed entire civilizations in the name of Jesus, the Virgin, the Catholic kings, and gold. In this way they ensured a perpetual sinecure in paradise for their immortal souls, and perpetual admiration from generations of schoolchildren who were taught in history lessons of their magnificent and daring exploits against the pagan savages whose phenomenal towns and monuments one can still see today (in ruins).

The absurd, but also realistic, element of this scenario involves the self-defeating factionalism among the socialists and communists and their inability to translate their affinity with the oppressed masses into coherent action:

The People’s Liberation Force was mainly a demolition group, whereas, for example, the People’s Vanguard was mainly an ambushing group, the People’s Liberation Front specialized in blackmail and extortion, and the Revolutionary Socialists in assassinating important people. The People’s Liberation Force probably chose its particular specialty because it was one of the safest; there is , after all, very little danger in planting bombs and then retreating to a safe distance. It apparently never perceived that you cannot alleviate the plight of the masses by destroying the infrastructure built up painfully slowly for their benefit on what little national wealth remained. But however paradoxical its behavior, what happened to the People’s Liberation Force was simply according to a general rule that applied to all humankind. The rule is that people always think that if they are very expert at something, that thing must be extremely important. The People’s Liberation Force was expert at explosives and therefore thought that what they did was crucial.

Some of the humor comes from a type of hyperbole that reminds me of Terry Pratchett in his Discworld series:
All this is history, but it does not do justice to the reality of the times in terms of the demonic wind of brutality and inhumanity that scoured the bodies and the souls of innocent and guilty alike.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ceded precedence to the Beast, the Mega Therion, which visited such inconceivable havoc upon the lives people that when it was finished, La Violencia had claimed over two hundred thousand of them. It is hard not to believe with hindsight that an infectious morbidity of the soul had contaminated the whole nation with an insanity of bloodlust thinly disguised at ideology and moral stance. There was a spreading sickness of ethical depravity that blew apart the eternal calm of the countryside and covered everything with a sticky slime of obscenity, viciousness, barbarity, and pointless cataclysm.

The insidious role of the Americans in supporting repressive puppet regimes favorable to social stability and business profits gets some zings in the tale. Their military training is extended to the secret police, which includes torture. As a result:
Brand-new methods of scalping, beheading, disemboweling, and quartering were improved and perfected by empirical experimentation and assiduous practice.

Don Emanuel, based on his past military experience, advises the rebel band that has adopted him and Dona Constanza:
It would be a mistake to kill Americans. …For one thing they are quite happy to throw their men away in futile causes. Secondly, they always believe they are in the right and that God is personally fighting for them, so they never give up. If you kill one gringo, they will send two in his place, and if you kill them, they will send over a fleet of helicopters. In any case it is better for you if you do not kill them, for they will do you a lot of good. …Although they are fanatical, they are mostly decent men. When they are present, our officers feel ashamed to commit atrocities. …No one understands their Spanish “so their advice is always misconstrued.” It helps to keep our army in chaos.

From the bits on de Bernieres in Wikipedia, it seems a stint as a young man from Sussex teaching English in Columbia stirred his imagination enough to compose his trilogy of the clashing and blending among Latin American cultures. That takes some chutzpa for an outsider. Like a blend of Vonnegut and John Irving, he walks the line between absurdism and sentimentality, with a comparable underlying playfulness. As much as de Bernieres acknowledges himself to be a “Márquez parasite”, he doesn’t really stray too much into magical realism. He calls the series “tragicomedies”. His hybridizing a tragic and dark realism with interludes of slapstick comedy strike me as closer to Shakespeare in form than Márquez. I ended up appreciating the author’s nice balance of warm-hearted treatment of his characters and jaundiced vision of South America, finding it both entertaining and inspiring. Mileage can vary among other readers, particularly given the range in people's tolerance of politically slanted satire.

[Margitte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Captain Corelli's Mandolin(1994) was my first encounter with Louis De Bernierès' writing. He reminded me so much of Giovanni Guareschi's tragicomedies (his Don Camillo tales-1950s), that I immediately pasted De Bernières onto my wall of exceptional writers. Combining dark sardonic humor, with brutality and surrealism, or magic realism, requires a fine mind and a strong sense of parody. That is what made Gabriel García Márquez the international bestseller that he was - and still is.

Louis De Bernières wrote a South American trilogy, consisting of:
1) The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts;
2) Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord;
3) The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman.

His characters are multiple. Here are a few:

Hectoro was an intelligent and intolerant man who looked on life very simply. A man needs women – he had three; he needs shelter – he had three; he needs money – he was foreman on the gringo’s hacienda; he needs status – he had his own mule, a revolver in a holster, leather bombachos, he could rope a steer with infallible precision, and he could hold alcohol in his wiry frame like no man else. The doctor had told him he was to die of liver failure because of the drink, and truly his skin had become yellowed; but he was proud and fiery-tongued, and he had threatened to shoot the doctor, who had then changed his diagnosis to something less disagreeable.
...
Don Emmanuel had become a local legend both on account of his delight in healthy dissolution, his choice of peasants as his natural friends, and his prodigious social concern. He had built the village school and employed Profesor Luis to teach not only knowledge but wisdom to the raggedy children; he paid a quarter more than any other patron in the whole department, and he adopted a method of making breezeblocks in a wooden lattice so that he could build a little house for each of his employees. It was in his Land-Rover that the whores went every Thursday for their check-up, he arbitrated in domestic disputes, he never failed to labour alongside his men, and many local women were able to testify that even the purest bred Negros were not more lusty nor more satisfying than he was. The only thing that they thought unacceptable about him was that he would always refuse to smoke, a quirk that was considered anti-social in a land where everyone of peasant stock, man, woman and child always had a large cigar stuck in their mouth, where only effeminate oligarchs smoked cigarettes, and where pipes were smoked only by French engineers and English alpinists. These cigars are, like their coffee, easily the most sublime in the world, but of both commodities they keep the best to themselves, exporting only the dross for the world’s connoisseurs to praise. To smoke one of those cigars outdoors of an evening in a hammock whilst drinking half a litre of thick black coffee is to condemn oneself unknowingly to a lifetime of nostalgia.
...
And it was the mountains that General Fuerte loved the most, for as one proceeds through the altitudes, the climate and the life change through three distinct stages. For the first seven thousand feet it is the Garden of Eden, a luxuriance of orchids, humming-birds, and tiny streams of delicious water that run by miracle alongside every path. Above this height for three or four thousand feet is a world of rock and water draped like hanging gardens with alien, lunar plants in shades of brown and red and yellow with a habit so curious and enchanted as to be found in books of legend and romance. Above this is the Venusian world of ice, of sudden reckless mists of palpable water, of lichen and trickling springs, of fragmenting shale and glistening white peaks, where human realities become remote and ridiculous, where the sky is actually below you and inside you, where breathing is an accomplishment in itself, and where condors, inconceivably ponderous and gigantic, wheel on the upcurrents like lords of a different and fantastic universe.

The novel explores the characters and stories of an imaginary town in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Margarita region of South America. There is a distinct class difference but when the trouble began, and their destiny became uncertain, all prejudice vaporized into thin air.

Don Emmanuel had some trouble to fit linguistically into the groove. He was regarded as an outstanding boor, since he refused to alter or modify his peasant accent. His Spanish left tears, laughter and misunderstandings behind wherever he went. Whatever he tried to communicate left the impression of sarcasm behind. Careta, his bay horse had a sense of humor, but was also a pasero, a horse who was trained not to trot, but to move at a steady, undulating lope. This was the one pace at which Don Emmanuel never rode it, so it had not only a sagging back, but also the depressed, irritated and frustrated air of a natural artist whom financial straits have reduced to taking a job as a bank clerk.

Dona Constanze wanted to divert the Mula river to feed her swimming pool. Some inhabitants would be seriously affected, devoided of water at their homes and lands. Don Emmanuel's irrigation scheme would also be affected. He was tasked to negotiate with her in his particular brand of Spanish.

'It has come to my ears, dear lady, that you intend to divert with a canal the very river which waters my land and that of the campesinos in order to replenish your piscina. I must say, as I know you appreciate frankness, that I and the local people will be fucked, buggered and immersed in guano of the finest Ecuadorean provenance before we permit such a thing to occur.’

'The permission,' she rallied, her temper rising almost immediately beyond control, 'is not yours or theirs to grant. I will do as I wish with the water on my land.'

'I appeal,' said Don Emmanuel, 'to your highly-developed social conscience and to your concern for my nether parts.'

Don Emmanuel had a strong case about his dingleberries. Only water could solve his dingleberry problem. Dona Constanze won't have none of it.... and so the story continues...

After the canal digging got skillfully sabotaged by the diggers, Dona Constanze had a brainwave. She rented a bulldozer.

The bulldozer took one month to arrive from Asuncion, two hundred kilometres away. It was not just that the machine was slow, which it was, nor that the roads were appalling, which they were; it was simply that the driver was easily bribed into doing all sorts of lucrative little oddjobs along the way, especially as he revelled in the people’s admiration for the awesomeness of the feats that his beloved machine could perform with magical ease. He gave free demonstrations to interested knots of people who never tired of seeing trees pulled over to no purpose, and huge fearsome bulls dragged along by a rope around the horns despite their having their hooves firmly planted against the soil and all their muscles straining. Halfway to the pueblo he had to turn back to Asuncion to fetch more diesel.

It is a tale of absurdity and make-believe(yet sadly a portrayal of true events), an equivalent to Cormack McCarthy's savage cruelty. It is the male counterpart of Isabel Allende's South American novels. You need a strong stomach to endure. But the endearing, lovable characters and the atmospheric descriptions of a magnificent world kept me going and going and going...I had to do it in several sitting, though. The cruelty and barbarity just got to me. Not that it is the first time I encountered it. It is part of our human story throughout history. And so familiar in the rest of the world too.

Somewhere between those pages, you will find the South American version of Tevye (or Tevye the Dairyman) in Fiddler On The Roof, or Zorba, the Greek. The villagers had their own G.I. Jane, with the attitude of Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) in the 1983 film Sudden Impact. Remedio was...tough...honorable...heroic...and beautiful. A Go ahead, make my day kinda young woman. Sprinkled all over the mountains, the animals and the people, concupiscence bounced the story up and down the formidable mountains.

Wikipedia : Set in an imagined Latin American country, the novel's political themes parody the worst excesses of the Pinochet government of Chile, the collapse of democratic social order in Uruguay in the 1970s, the Colombian Armed Conflict between the military and communist guerrillas and other dirty wars of the 1960s to 1980s in Southern and Central America. The main action of the story takes place in the small town of Chiriguaná, whose population is richly drawn in affectionate character portraits that make up a large part of the novel. Other parts of the novel take place in the capital city of the fictional nation, in the clubs of the corrupt military commanders, and the palace of the distracted, amoral president.

Although the name of the country of the trilogy is never directly disclosed, several reasons cause it to most resemble Colombia. De Bernières' experiences from spending time living in Colombia will probably have influenced its setting. Geographically, references are made to the country's equatorial climate, its northern coastline on the Caribbean, western coastline on the Pacific Ocean and the mountain range of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Margarita, which is similar to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The Colombian town of Valledupar, in the Cesar Department, and Medellín are commonly mentioned, and the fictional town of Chiriguaná bears the same name as the Colombian town Chiriguaná. In the sequel to the novel, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord, the notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar (thinly disguised under a pseudonym) is a central character. The book sarcastically describes the 'democratic' politics of the country as the result of 'La Violencia', whereby two political parties jointly ruled on alternating administrations. There is a clear parallel between this and the National Front regime of Colombia, which followed on from La Violencia and lasted from 1958 to 1974, in which the Liberal and Conservative parties governed jointly.

Often hilariously funny--I barked indecent laughter at the world at times--; other times breathtakingly sad, it remains a tale to be read, and above all, experienced. De Bernières is a master storyteller.

RECOMMENDED, I would say.

[Algernon (Darth Anyan) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life is nothing if not a random motion of coincidences and quirks of chance; it never goes as planned or as foretold; frequently one gains happiness from being obliged to follow an unchosen path, or misery from following a chosen one. How often can one refrain from wondering what portentuous events may not have arisen from some trivial circumstance which thereby has acquired a significance far beyond itself?

A spoiled matron wants to divert the local river in order to replenish the water in her stagnant pool. An Army General takes a vacation alone in the mountains to chase butterflies. Between them they inadvertently start a war in an imaginary Latin American republic. afictional place that is a synthesis, a distillation of all of them. Before attaining fame with his vivid description of rural life in the middle of World War II on a small Greek island, Louis de Bernieres flexed his literary muscles in this debut novel by painting an exuberant and subversive picture of life in an isolated village, somewhere between the Andes and the Amazonian jungle. Politics, mythology, black humour, economics, tragedy, war crimes, nature unleashed, bestial passion, religion, philosophy, death, new born life - the whole range of human experience is gravitating around the 'dingleberries' of Don Emmanuel, a British expat who renounced the dubious benefits of a higher education for the freedom and the laidback lifestyle of the tropics.

Don Emmanuel had attended Cambridge in order to study botany, and joined the Conservative, the Labour, the Liberal, and the Communist parties all at once 'to get a balanced view'.

On his first study trip to the Andes, Don Emmanuel decided to go AWOL, sample all the ladies in the local whorehouse and become a cattle farmer. Despite being the title character of the novel, Don Emmanuel is not much of an active character in the developing plot, preferring to act as an 'eminence gris' in an advisory capacity, and to let his charitable acts speak for themselves. Most of the story is told through the eyes of the villagers, a mix of former black slaves, descendants of the Incas, mestizos sharing blood from the Spanish conquistadores and the Indios, aboriginal tribes from the jungle, local and imported guerilleros, American investors and the odd French couple of expats. Opposing them in the incipient war are government soldiers led by inept officers, venal politicians, a trio of Army Chiefs of Staff dreaming of military dictatorship, death squads 'disappearing' leftist and dirty liberals, rapacious ministers and a scatterbrained president married to a pole dancer.

Bernieres acknowledges his debt to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the influence of the great storyteller is easy to discern in the earthy, exuberant lives of the local peasants, in the intrusion of magic into a cruel reality. A plague of laughter in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, an invasion of fast-growing cats, conversations with ghosts and miraculous healings of incurrable diseases , even ressurection of people dead and buried under a glacier for several centuries are as much a part of the landscape as the mosquitos and the drug dealers. Pedro, the local hunter and witch doctor, knows the secret of life, bringing together the materials and idealist philosophical schools into a practical credo:

If you think for a minute, everything is natural, and everything is spirits.

I guess the comparison with Marques has its merits, but for me the tone of the novel is closer to the combination of black humour, sarcastic observations of human folly and deeply entrenched humanism that defines the work of Kurt Vonnegut. The reason for this is probably the fact that I read a month ago Galapagos , a fable of the future set in Ecuador and dealing like Don Emmanuel and his friends with political, economical and social dissolution. Of the two writers, and despite my long infatuation with Vonnegut, I must admit that de Bernieres is the better storyteller. His characters really come alive, their passions brought closer to the surface by the stifling heat and the fertility of the surrounding jungle. The joys of food, of dancing, of fornicating are in counterpoint to the squalor, the poverty, the threat of death waiting around every corner. Half-measures and timidity have no place in this world, and the bold who take their fate in their own hands will be the survivors. In his role of more or less disinterested witness of the proceedings, the French expat expresses in a letter what the illiterate peasants know deep in their bones:

And yet I still feel how glorious this country is, and how romantic. Even the moon is four times the size of that of France, and the birds and butterflies are indescribably beautiful and joyously coloured. The people too are brightly arrayed and seemingly always laughing and delighted. The soil is fertile and we have emeralds and oil, but it seems nothing ever comes of it. People here help each other for nothing, and yet no official will ever move a finger without a bribe - isn't that a contradiction? They love all mankind, these people, but kill each other with not a moment's thought!

Even the bad guys have a larger than life presence, like villains in an opera libretto. The small-scale invasion of an empty piece of rock in the ocean becomes a conflagration of epic proportions. A building project in the capital must surpass all the wonders of the world combined. A clueless president engages in tantric sex in order to reduce the national debt. Generals play with bombs like children with marbles. It is a fun ride, but de Bernieres knows how to bring the reader back to the cruel reality of 'collateral' victims: innocent Indians sprayed with napalm, children stepping on landmines, ten years old girls raped by the soldiers, liberals tortured in secret chambers and then killed and dumped on garbage landfills. Life in Latin America is cheap, and there is a too long history of insurgency and counter-insurgency fueled by 'manifest destiny' superpower ambitions, by drug dealers interference and by corporatist greed. The author manages a not too easy balancing act between right-wing and left-wing mentalities, lampooning both with equal gusto. His sympathies are clearly devoted to the impoverished and exploited villagers, who are concerned with survival and not with the power games played in the capital:

Eventually, in an historic feat of compromise, democracy was restored by the abolition of elections, and the two parties agreed to rule alternately for four years periods, thus postponing La Violencia indefinitely.

I was pleasantly surprised when, doing a little background research on the author, I found out that most of the events described in the book are grounded in actual developments from Chile, columbia, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela and other countries in the region. There is no need for fiction when reality provides such rich material for satire. Some of these events hit painfully close to home, as they mirror the venality of politicians and the ruthlessness of so-called foreign investors who are quick to drain a country of all its resources in the aftermath of a political upheaval, a situation Romanian people are already only too familiar with. Whole factories have been sold for scrap iron, and the ports are filled with cut timber for export:

In this way the country was completely de-industrialized as cheap foreign goods replaced local ones and foreign capital moved in to asset-strip the abandoned industrial base.

Latin America is known also for its machismo, for its male dominated society. I found it refreshing in Louis de Bernieres' approach to see women in a position of power, more than holding their own in the testosterone-filled environment. A hooker is elected to the village council, a spoiled landowner wife is awakened to passion when removed from her luxury mansion, the idealist student daughter of a banker is joining the guerilleros after being mistreated by the secret police. The strongest of them all, Remedios, a mountain girl, is the chosen leader of a band of revolutionaries:

We elected her when we realised that she had more brains and more balls than all of us put together.

I have already probably given away too much abot the building elements and main characters of the novel. I should probably have said more about the wonderful prose and the lush imagery of the countryside, perched between imposing mountains and impenetrable jungle. It's hard to believe this is a debut novel. Bernieres mastery of language and of plot is impressive, his familiarity with his subject the result of the years he spent in Columbia as a teacher. Small details hide behind the easy humour a deeply felt concern for the preservation of the natural wonders and of the cultural diversity of the whole continent, reduced for the purpose of the story to a single imaginary country. Here's a short exchange between Don Emmanuel and Aurelio, the Indian farmer on the subject of cutting trees from the jungle:

- "That tree is a quebracha, the wood is so hard that it can be used for paving roads. Try another one. [...] No, that is a rubber tree; it would be a waste. No, that is a brazil nut tree; it would be a waste. No, that is a sacred tree; it would offend Pachacamac.

In the end, Don Emmanuel gives up on his tree-felling project, unlike the many enterprises that thrive on clear-cutting the lungs of our planet.
The jungle is fascinating and full of wonders, but if I were offered a chance to visit the places described in the novel, I would set my goal on the Andes just like the villagers who leave their original place in a march of biblical proportions .

The truth is that the mountains are a place where you can find whatever you want just by looking, as long as you remember that they do not suffer fools gladly, and particularly dislike those with preconceived ideas.

The next book in the series (a must read for me, after the fun I had with the present one), promises more adventures in the mountains, the jungle or the capital city. I'm hoping my favorite characters will fare well in the sequel, although with de Bernieres there is no guarantee of a happy ending, or even of a logical and compassionate universe:

You have to understand that some Gods have no more brains than a monkey, and play the same kinds of tricks.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say? This book is great. Louis de Bernieres really gets Latin America. I mean, any author can write about how tragic it is to live in a contemporary Latin American country (amid crushing poverty, constant unrest, military rule, etc). What de Bernieres recognizes is that everyday life in Latin America is also totally hilarious. This book empathizes with people in tragic circumstances by laughing at them. And, just as important, laughing with them and having them laugh at the reader. No one is spared the ridicule in this book. Which is good, because just like in the real third world, humor might be the only way to keep oneself afloat in this book's swelling tide of violence, sadness, and despair. Crap. That doesn't make it sound funny at all. But trust me: it is.

[F.R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I last read ‘The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts’ about twenty years ago. I remember it as being a frustrating experience, that for all its colour and vibrancy it was a book which annoyed me. But then, as some books manage to do, it lingered in my mind – like the shadow of some half-forgotten dream – and even though two decades had passed I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something in ‘The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts’ worthwhile exploring further.

So I read it again.

Written before ‘Captain Correli’s Mandolin’ made him extremely famous, Louis de Bernières here conjures up a picaresque, magic-realist exploration of a fictional South American country. We visit a small remote village (where the Don Emmanuel of the title resides), the various ranks of the army, a band of communist guerrilla rebels, Indian tribes and even the President’s office. At its best de Bernières gives us chapters of wit and satire, with jokes that recall Douglas Adams both in construction and the laughter they bring. It is – when on song – a tremendously funny and sharp read which does conjure up the sights, the smells and the idiosyncratic culture of this country.

Unfortunately my reaction of all those years ago was repeated, it is also an incredibly frustrating experience. The book’s wandering through the different strata of society often feels just like meandering. There is very little centre to the narrative, no sense that it is necessarily going anywhere. (For instance, the incident which gives the book its title is forgotten within fifty pages). Some of the chapters are great, but there are others which don’t have that wit and some which are just plain dull. As such this reader didn’t soar with the book towards its conclusion, more plodded towards its arbitrary ending.

So once again I found ‘The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts’ an annoying experience and not the best read I’ve encountered for awhile, but I do have a suspicion it will still be with me in 2033.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first of Louis de Bernières Latin American Trilogy and his debut novel. Although I was drawn in from the beginning, it seemed at first that the story was too fragmented. There are a lot of characters making up several groups of characters, each having its own plot line. I was inclined to want more of the one with Don Emmanuel and his nether parts, much of which was laugh out loud funny. But this novel is also described as tragicomic. In fact, one of the plot lines is particularly dark and some may set this aside because of it.

I wondered if I would be able to keep all the characters and plot lines straight. I needn't have worried. de Bernières manages to weave them together into a whole. Usually we can expect a South American novel to have aspects of magical realism, and there are those parts. There are also parts where he exaggerates magical realism taking it to absurdity. Or at least it seemed so to me.

There is the war of the title, but it is not what most of us would think of war. There are many factions in this fictitious Latin American country, most made up of either very right-wing or very left-wing. de Bernières lived for a few years in Colombia. The country of the trilogy is made up of a corrupt army, inept politicians, peasants, communist revolutionaries, with a few rich oligarchs thrown in for good measure. In order for the peasants to survive, bribing the officials was a requirement. The mayor was also the local policeman, which engendered a desirable reduction in local bureaucracy and meant that only one man needed to be bribed rather than two; for this reason the locals were also trying to get him appointed as magistrate and gobernador.

I found the prose itself complex enough to remark to myself about it more than once. On the other hand, there were times when he listed things in such a way that it became ridiculous - undoubtedly his purpose at that point of the novel. I enjoyed this novel more as I got deeper into it. I definitely plan to read the second in the trilogy soon, and we'll see if I can figure out how to squeeze in the third too. I hesitate to give this 5-stars, but I did love it. So there it is.

[Scribble Orca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aaaahhhh!

How could I have forgotten this gem?

This is what arises when one reads old letters intended for friends that have remained unsent, a kind of temporal journal of misplaced memories in which startling revelations unfold: did I do that? Oh....yes, I remember - that's what happened...ooooh, that wasn't very clever, was it?

So...this book. I have no idea why it was so impressive so many years ago. It just was. Here's what I had to say about it in this long-lost-recently-resurfaced piece of correspondence:

I have started reading another book The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, by Louis de Bernieres. I am alternatively amused at the irony, impressed with the use of language, and appalled at the viciousness of certain of the scenes described. I am envious that I cannot put pen to paper to create a fictitious (or actual) world in which to delineate and resolve my own philosophical conundrums or describe my journeys in time and space. Surely, if people are reading and appreciating these writers, I should find too an audience not threatened or bored by this tumultuous cascade of thoughts and ideas that yearns to find coherent expression through either the written word or the medium of film. Dear ???, do you find my letters entertaining, provoking, or simply eternally desultory spirals predominantly (and preponderantly) concerned with “I”?

As you can see, the piece of correspondence probably had no point in surfacing other than to remind me of the existence of the Don's nether parts.

[Salathiel · Rating 1 out of 5]

I feel inherently bad whenever I decide to rate a book with such a dismal rating as “1 Star.” Yes, I am fully aware that my opinionated “1” means diddlysquat in the totality of things; that I am just a minuscule reader, one of millions, and my less than stellar rating is predictable should a publisher or an author apply even the most rudimentary standards of the law of averages. Yet even so, there is a dread and a hollowness that comes when I find myself decisively clicking “1” as a measure of the quality of a bygone reading experience.

I guess I feel this numbness at being so potentially hypercritical because I know that a book is a creation of a different bent. A book isn’t made with the same casualness as tossing together an uninspired and soggy Cesar salad. A book also isn’t a machinated amalgamation, the sum total of spokes and wheels and levers coming together to produce a bounded copy with words spawned by an errant thoughtlessness.

No. A book holds life-force. A book is breathed into being with the sweat and toil and trepidation of another living soul. Someone lost sleep typing its pages. Someone ran late to Bat Mitzvahs and retirement parties just so they could capture that evanescent and fleeting image before it receded into the back of their cluttered mind. Someone practiced months, if not years, of abnegation, denying themselves simple charms and pleasures just to give life to the inkling of a tale that was dancing around the edges of their brain. Someone was bold enough to forego inhibition and to present their work and their baby to the world to be received or rejected. At the end of the day, a book is but a simulacrum of the will and determination of a human soul, and to give it a “1” feels like I am spitting on someone’s magnum opus.

See, when I read a book I am aware that I am gazing into the innermost life of someone. Sure, they may gloss over things with inexplicable events or unbelievable characters, but I know that somewhere in those pages lies hints at the foundation of beliefs that said author ascribes to. A book is revelatory, in ways that a picture can never be.

Therefore, the decision to rate The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts a “1” was both a heady and a weighty one. It was a little easier to make given that I seem to be the anomaly, and most have developed fond and positive feelings toward this book, but nevertheless, it was still a rating that I subconsciously wanted to withhold.

So, what went wrong? To start, there was too much farce and not enough substance. This novel tells the tale of a fictitious internecine war between politicos in an unnamed South American country. Guerrillas vs. Communists. Liberals vs. Maoists. Government vs. Military. And a number of other interlocking combinations of battles that would give Fibonacci’s Number a run for its money. Quite frankly, the cause or reason for the war was hard to understand, which I believe was by author’s intent. This was designed to be satirical, with De Bernieres making a statement of how the wars of men are fought over the most paltry and indeterminable things. However, the tone throughout this “war” was perhaps too light. Rape and murder and torture and coups and landmines and decimation of entire villages was presented with a humor laced nonchalance that made them feel like nonevents. I felt nonplussed by almost every horror, not because I am a sadist, but because these grotesqueries were happening with such a brevity and rapidity that it left me unmoved.

But perhaps even more damning was the fact that the characters in this book were flat and underdeveloped. The characters felt like nothing more than a motley crew of screw-ups with cereal box backstories, which meant that their successes and failures inspired little empathy or emotion. And because this book was structured with shifting POV’s, those few characters who were interesting and redeemable were given such little face time that they too began to feel like scenery to a jumble of a tale. Even Don Emmanuel, the book’s namesake, was an afterthought of a character whose eponymous placement in the book’s title seems to be the most whimsical and capricious of mysteries.

I came into this book with high expectations. I was expecting a book that was sultry, magical, well-written, and tempered with a balanced humor. Instead I only received glimpses of beautiful writing that was lost in a fog of excessive extremes in terms of comedy and fancy.

I expected this book to be a doppelganger of an Isabel Allende or a Gabriel Garcia Marquez work, but its lack of deftness and restraint and to be quite frank again, realism, made this book a hard one for me to enjoy. I don’t think I have ever finished and closed a book with such a marathon runner’s weariness, glad to have crossed the finish line and to be able to move on to something else.

[Sonia Gomes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Louis de Bernières needs a huge canvas, not for him a small space, so he creates a country, an imaginary country in Latin America...

A new Country would feel lonely... So he fills it with wondrous forests teeming with wild animals, with the jaguar the beloved of the Incas, humming birds of every colour, rivers full of fishes of every description...

Now this beautiful country continues to feel lonely and bereft and needs someone to admire its wondrous beauty, so he populates it with people...
The Country now has all versions of people, kind, corrupt, sly, poor, rich and violent and all those innumerable races and types, campesinos, native Indians and colonial landowners, left-wing revolutionaries and patriotic army careerists.
Of course all these types and these races have their own stories to tell, that’s what human life is all about, all through the World.

So from all these hundreds of people swarming this wondrous land, someone rich and bored like Dona Constanza finds that her swimming pool needs more water and so petulantly orders that a local river be diverted to fill her swimming pool...
The Campesinos resist and request another landowner, Don Emmanuel to help them out. Don Emmanuel’s argument is that if the river is diverted he would not be able to wash the 'dingleberries' out of his nether parts...
As expected, when there are so many types of people, one thing leads to another and the army is called in...
As expected, the peasants get mixed up with the local guerrillas...
Events can always escalate to a point of no return…
Then the peasants and the guerrillas decide to escape from the violence and sure death...
And there is an Exodus...

And then there are those people who stay in your mind forever, take General Fuerte...
Strangely in that mess of corruption, General Fuerte is one of those few who has not yielded to corruption. He believes in the Army and tries very hard to make sure his branch of the army performs honourably.
In the midst of his onerous tasks, he has a passion; his real passion is the taxonomy of animals.
When eventually everything gets too much for him, he deserts in order to follow his dream of recording the different species of hummingbirds found in the jungle.
Captured by the guerrillas, whose leader is a woman of great fortitude and who has her own stories to tell...
The guerrillas want to kill him for being in the army, but later realize how naïve he is and instead keep him as a prisoner for a very long time...

But it is Aurelio who breaks your heart, he a Mountain Indian who finds his way into the tribes in the jungle.
He and his wife cannot have children, so they raise dogs. When out in the jungle one day with their dogs they stumble upon a toddler, a feral girl.
They adopt her, she is their daughter and she is so beautiful, but beautiful girls most of the time have sad endings and tragedy strikes Parlanchina...

But life is never sad all of the time, there is a whole lot of fun too...
The country has a President married to a former stripper...
Prostitutes who take revenge on corrupt and violent Army Officers by infecting them with all sorts of venereal diseases...

This is not a mythical country in Latin America; this is the world we live in.
Only Louis de Bernières put it together for us!

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first instalment of de Bernières’ fabulous Latin American Trilogy. Magical writing in more than one sense. Tragic and comic at the same time. Obviously influenced heavily by García-Márquez’s writing but totally original and compelling!

[Reid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone who wishes to write fiction should read this book but prepared to be disappointed - in your own abilities in comparison with de Bernieres, who has swiftly become one of my favorite English writers. His style, plot, humor and candor make him irresistible, as does his subject matter, in this case, the impoverished campesinos of a mythical South American country. De Bernieres is like an English Marquez, crafting a land of magical realism with all the ugliness of the real world. De Bernieres' wide pallette of characters and archetypes comes to extraordinary life in this fine first novel, the beginning of a trilogy on the people of Chiriguana and, later, Cochadebajo de los Gatos. The novel is a roller-coaster ride of revolution, genocide, spiritual love, heresy and diaspora. If you're looking for a great book to enthrall you for a weekend at the beach or a few afternoons at the pool, look no further.

[Bucket · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are far too many characters and events to offer a sensical summary, but I'll give it a shot. We're in an imaginary South American country where an endless battle is going on between the government, the military, and guerilleros (many are communist) with civilians more or less suffering the consequences. This book is hilarious and fun to read and doesn't feel even remotely tragic, despite the fact that it's extremely violent and gory - there is rape, murder, torture, kidnapping, gun and machete battles, coups, etc. But there is also discussion of dingleberries, goofy turns of events that are based on lack of communication or several evil characters all trying to kill each other. There are magical bits like the plague of cats, the ancient soldiers coming to life, the magical healing of Francoise's cancer, and the President's focus on alchemy. There are little nuggets of tongue-in-cheek philosophy.

A few pages in, I let go of ensuring I kept perfect track of the characters and just let the story carry me along for the ride. For the most part I kept everyone straight, and honestly this book is an enjoyable romp no matter what. It's hilarious, it's absurd in a telling way, it's disgusting, it's violent and horrific but somehow avoids being tragic, and it's absolutely brilliant.

I loved a discussion of patriotism towards the beginning of the book and how there are two types of patriots. The first type believes that all other countries are inferior to their own and that their country is never ever wrong so the best thing to do is dominate. The second type sees faults but loves his country anyway and therefore labors to correct these faults. The first kind of patriot really glories in his own irrationality, while the second kind glories in his homeland.

My favorite bits were the sprinklings of semi-universal wisdom that are sprinkled throughout. This is where the author's playful voice really shines. Some examples:

"They are a people who have learned by their own blood the wondrous disadvantages of an eventful history."

"Life is nothing if not a random motion of coincidences and quirks of chance; it never goes as planned or as foretold; frequently one gains happiness from being obliged to follow an unchosen path or misery from following a chosen one."

"A general rule that applies to all humankind... people always think that if they are very expert at something, that thing must therefore be extremely important."

"Old friends shook hands and people who had never talked in the past exchanged confidences. Such things are caused not by fear but by the revelation that there is nothing stable in the whole universe and that everything is finally a matter of chance, which can so suddenly throw the lives of people into chaos."

"The truth is that the mountains are a place where you can find whatever you want just by looking, as long as you remember that they do not suffer fools gladly and particularly dislike those with preconceived ideas."

"There is nothing at all wrong with our laws and institutions and our constitution, which are all democratic and enlightened. What is wrong is that they are enforced by people who do not consider themselves bound by them."

Themes: South America, politics, humor, magical realism, many characters, war, race

[Charlaralotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Stupendous. Magnificent. This ranks right up there with Garcia Marquez and Allende. Glorious Latin American magical realism. So wonderful to read every step of the way. Brilliant, insightful, incisive, sly. And every character so fully drawn--I could pick each one out in a crowd. To write like this, in epic proportions, drawing from all walks of life and all types of human reasoning... what a truly wonderful talent to have. Can't wait to read his other books.

Too bad that movie version of "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" was such drivel. Otherwise I might have discovered Bernieres long ago. Well, now is as good a time as ever.

A wonderful couple paragraphs about patriotism:

"There are two types of patriotism, although sometimes the two are mingled in one breast. The first kind one might call nationalism; nationalists believe that all other countries are inferior in every respect, and one would do them a favour by dominating them. Other countries are always in the wrong, they are less free, less civilised, are less glorious in battle, are perfidious, prone to falling for insane and alien ideologies which no reasonable person could believe, are irreligious and abnormal. Such patriots are the most common variety, and their patriotism is the most contemptible thing on earth.

The second type of patriot is best described by returning to the example of General Fuerte. General Fuerte did not believe in 'my country, right or wrong'; on the contrary, he loved his land despite the faults he could so clearly see and that he laboured to correct. It was his frequently stated opinion that anyone who supported their country when it was obviously in the wrong, or who failed to see its faults, was the worst kind of traitor. Whereas the first kind of patriot really glories in his own irrationality and not in his country, General Carlo Maria loved his country as a son loves his mother or a brother his sister."

Take that, George Bush.

[Maria Lago · Rating 4 out of 5]

¡Me había olvidado de que hace dos décadas leí los libros de De Bernières! Qué cabeza, por favor, si son fantásticos. Este fue el primero que leí y su complicada y muy ajustada trama tiene muchos momentos divertidos, escondidos detrás de un horror auténtico a la fiera más espantosa del mundo: nosotros.
Literatura de alta calidad, chicos. Algo que casi nunca leo, jaja.

[A. Dawes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm in two minds whenever I enter a de Beneieres' novel. I loved Captain's Corelli's Mandolin (please don't judge this book by the subpar film, and/or Nicolas Cage's joke of a performance); yet I loathed Birds Without Wings; and after three swings at the very twee Partisan's Daughter, I eventually struck out without finishing.

Yet this novel works: it has a cast of larger than life characters, it's satirical and darkly comical, and it also has liberal doses of South American style magical realism.

The story is set in a fictitious South American nation, a country whose incredibly scenic topography is marred by the typical historical problems that have occurred on the continent: corruption, political power plays, the exploiters, and the impoverished exploited.

I won't discuss the plot here, but de Benieres masters the tightrope. A difficult one between light and darkness, the tragic and the comedic.

Recommended for lovers of satire, and also lovers of rich writing, and -although not truly historical- lovers of historical fiction.

[Ronja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Válka o zadnici dona Emanuela je zvláštní směsicí magického realismu, šílených nápadů, tajemného pralesa s všudypřítomnými duchy, černého humoru i střízlivé reality hrůz života v totalitní zemi zmítané občanskými nepokoji a zlovůlí vládnoucí vojenské kliky. Kvůli tomu všemu je zasazení fiktivní země do prostředí jižní Ameriky nabíledni a přes všechny nadpřirozené jevy (nutně potřebuju domácí kočku velikosti koně) lze lehce nabýt dojmu, že toto všechno by se koneckonců klidně mohlo stát. Lidé jsou šílení, obzvlášť pokud jde o vidinu moci.

Ne úplně typická kniha, která by šla jednoznačně žánrově zařadit. Rozhodně si ale zaslouží být přečtená - už jen kvůli kouzelnému jazyku a povedenému překladu.

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

It has a great many ideas but often seems like de Bernieres is just using them without reason. When it's good, it's very good, it has the power to be charming, heartfelt, shocking and humorous all at the same time (the chapter introducing of Parlanchina is a great example). Unfortunately, some of the less powerful ideas drag the pace, especially when each idea rarely has any significance in later chapters of the book. It's more like 40 odd loosely connected short stories about a fictional south American community. There is a lot going on to be admired, but the lack of conventional structure means that when the book is good, it can be great, and when its mediocre, it can terribly dull.

[jaroiva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nejdřív jsem si říkala, že to vůbec není téma pro mě. Ale zaujalo mě jihoamerické prostředí, kam moc ráda jezdím na dovolenou. Moc se mi líbí překlad, takže jsem i pokračovala a postupně se mi to víc a víc začínalo líbit. Některé pasáže mi nedělaly dobře. Jsem na to mučení čímdál víc měkká. Ale bylo to psané celé s takovou lehkostí, že i ty těžší pasáže se daly bez újmy překonat.
Teď zjišťuju, že je to první díl trilogie, takže je jasné, že se budu muset pustit i do dalších dílů.

[dianne b. · Rating 5 out of 5]

a perfect novel - the writing, the characters - perfect.

[RoseB612 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Z evropského pohledu na věc je Jižní Amerika "ten kontinent s armádními puči, drogovými kartely a přepjatým náboženským cítěním" - a přesně těmto třem fenoménům se ve své trilogii Bernières věnuje. A také vzpourám proti nim, protože všechny tři se snaží ovládat a omezovat lidi a někteří z hrdinů trilogie se proti tomu rozhodnou bojovat.

První díl se zaměřuje na armádu, opakované vojenské převraty, intrikování, násilnosti a "mizení" nepřátel. A také na zhoubný vliv moci - protože velitel likvidační jednotky je naprosto klasický případ člověka, který se přes počáteční výhrady zhlédne ve svém "poslání" a naprosto ztratí vztah k realitě (což se stane také Dionisovi a El Inocentemu v dalších dílech). Bernières zvolil místy dost humorný přístup k tématu, ze všech tří dílů je tenhle určitě nejzábavnější a především vyjednávací schopnosti dona Emmanuela mě dostaly do kolen. A samozřejmě nesmí chybět magický realismus - ale tady mi sednul a k příběhu se opravdu hodí.

Co mi dělalo ze začátku trochu problémy byl velký počet postav - především ve vesnici a jejím okolí. Trvalo mi docela dlouhou dobu než jsem se zorientovala a dokázala si jednotlivé postavy vždy znovu přiřadit k příběhu, ale tak od půlky knížky už to bylo lepší.

Z celé trilogie se mi tenhle díl líbil asi nejvíc a určitě nelituji, že jsem se rozhodla přečíst všechny tři knihy. Na plný počet hvězdiček tomu přece jen něco chybělo, ale tady je to tak 4,5.

Kontext: V 1001 listu je prostřední díl trilogie - Seňor Vivo a drogový baron - ale rozhodla jsem se ji přečíst celou a popořadě.

První věta: "Ten týden začal pro kapitána Rodriga José Fuguerase skutečně slibně."

Poslední věta: "Na tomto místě se uzavírá historie války o zadnici dona Emmanuela. Na ni navazují dějiny města Cochadebajo de los Gatos, příběhy nedostižné lásky Remedios a hraběte Pompeya Xaviera de Estremadura, Anicy, Dionisia a dopisů o koce, jakož i vyprávění o křížové výpravě proti novým albigenským a o příšerných zločinech nové inkvizice."

[Vít · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mám rád příběhy z Jižní Ameriky, líbí se mi magický realismus (když se to umí) a sedí mi tenhle styl humoru. Co můžu dělat jiného, než dát maximum?
Nikdy bych nehádal, že autor je Angličan, nepřijde mi to o nic míň "jihoamerické" než třeba Dům duchů nebo Sto roků samoty. A o nic horší.
Najdete tu všechno - diktátory i partyzány, generály i pralesní indiány, tajnou policii i magické kočky. A přitom je to psané tak lehce a s humorem, že si ani neuvědomujete, že některé pasáže jsou jako z Nabarveného ptáčete. Utrpení a smrt se míchá s magií, s nadějí a láskou i s humorem a absurditou a výsledek je výborná mixtura, navíc perfektně přeložená. Vivat Janiš :)
Těším se na další dva díly a rozhodně půjdu i do dalších Bernièresových knih. A samozřejmě doporučuji.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This ripping good read is almost too perfect: written by a no doubt crotchety Englishman, this farce is a distillation of Latin American magical realism, with a plethora of outlandish stories all boiled down into sparkling and colorful set-pieces set loose to writhe on a sultry chessboard of human misery and almost cheerfully morbid political skullduggery.

The prose style is excellent (as twisty but of course far more accomplished than the sample provided by this amateur in the preceding paragraph), and what separates the story from pure farce is the attention to detail and the love for the pure, living and breathing forms of nature in South America. The major lack in this book is a coherence of narrative and character, to the point that it may have made more sense as a short story collection; however, while having all these unrelated stories bumping into each other in Brownian motion may be a little distracting, it certainly is charming.

[Valerie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another book chosen by a member of my book club that really was a truly terrible read. Not only would I not recommend it to anyone, but I'd actively tell them to avoid it.

This book doesn't do anything right. The start is a good example of things. In a very short space of time we're introduced to 6 or 7 different characters, told a lot about them, and then are expected to not only care about them, but to be able to remember who is who when they turn up again later, even as more characters are introduced. So not only do we not learn much about them, but we're told a lot of stuff instead of actually be shown any of it, a classic sign of a poor writer.

This brings me to my next big quibble, the voice of the story. Due to the huge cast and the fact that the author felt the need to add all kinds of extraneous information not necessary for the story, we are quite distant from each of the characters. Therefore the voice is an omniscient narrator that takes a haughty view of things at times like 'Our characters' that is just plain annoying and goes back to us being told a lot of things about a lot of people, places & situations instead of being shown them. This makes the reader distant from what is going on and, frankly, far less interested in it all. It also gets irritating when this voice tries to tell us what to feel about a situation like how we must "look on in awe" at something that has been poor described and is both uninteresting and boring.

Then we have the tone. It is clear that the author thinks he is being funny and clever at various points as the way sentences are structured or phrased is clearly meant to be tongue in cheek and is so over exaggerated that it isn't an accident. The only problem? The humor completely and utterly fails and so the whole thing falls flat on its face. Therefore we're left seeing where we should have laughed but being completely unable to even crack a smile as the crafting is so bad.

To go along with this, the author feels the need to show each and every possibility when describing things, so the narrative gets bogged down in lists that completely break the flow of a scene and make it really hard for the reader to not just skip ahead a few lines. Just look at this single example:
"He was oppressed and horrified by the merciless buzzing of the mosquitoes, the calls of the trumpeter birds, the shrieks of the black-faced howler monkeys with their hideous goitred necks, the sounds of trains mysteriously created by ducks in flight, the prehistoric grunts of caimans, the strange greetings of tapirs, sounding exactly like 'Hi!', the irritating cracking of fingers made by the ageronia butterflies, the ringing of bells made by some mysterious fish beneath his raft, the outraged idiotic squawks of hundreds of different kinds of parrots, the coughs of the forest fox, the chatting of the anis birds, the demonic laughter of otters, the unearthly beautiful song of the white-eared puff birds, the unnerving nocturnal hilarity of the laughing hawk, the 'Koro! Koro!' of the cayenne ibis, the piping of guans, the jaguar calls of the tiger heron, the rattles of the cocoi heron, and, worst of all, the demented scrapings of armies of gigantic crickets."
One sentence, 10 lines long & with 157 words! Seriously?! Who the hell edited this book, or rather didn't do so? Give a few examples of what you mean and move on, don't list each and every example that you can possible think of! By the time you get to the end of such a list you need to glance back up to remember what was going on in the first place.

The editing comment really is at the heart of a lot of this book's problems. The rushed beginning, overly wordy narrative and drawn out story all could have been made thousands of times better if this book had just seen even a single decent editor. They probably would have also realized that throwing lots of Spanish into the mix probably wasn't a good idea either, especially not when the meaning of the Spanish words can't be derived from the sentence and I'm saying this after having lived in the States and thus having learned a fair amount of the language. I can only imagine how someone with no knowledge of the language fared!

Finally we get to yet another glaring problem with this book. Namely the way it deals with women. I don't think that there is a single female character in the whole story for whom we don't know their sexual history, relevant or not. The vast majority of the women fall into either the 'whole' or 'virgin' categories and don't do much else besides, and even those that don't tend to be refrigerator women have their sexual status/history made known for stupid reasons. This is not something which happens with the male characters.
As if that wasn't enough, every time the author speaks of women, it is in a negative light. For instance, wives are described as "tiresome and sometimes boring" and nag men to "attend to details that he thought were unimportant" making them "often tempted to leave". Either that or they "were out for nothing but to marry the richest man they could find in order that they could live the idlest and most fatuous lives possible" while giving "their doting husbands as little congress as possible for their money, thus driving them into the arms of those women who were somewhat less chaste". So here not only has he essentially said that even the wives are whores, but it is their fault that their husbands cheat. Nice.

To finish off the list of failures of this book we have 2 more. The stupid title that is only relevant to one chapter of the book and was probably chosen to titillate and draw in readers, which is always the sign of a bad book because only those that can't stand on their own seek to mislead readers or use such cheap tricks. And the fact that the author couldn't seem to even chose a genre (or genres) to stick to. At times it tries to pass itself off as a comedy, fantasy (people and donkeys giving birth to leopards, really?!?), realism... and therefore fails to be any of them, leaving just a hopeless mix of lose ends and unsatisfying stories.

The only part that was even remotely enjoyable was the middle bit of the armed forces story arc where they set up and utilize a secret police/interrogation force. But even that devolved into a mess when the attempted humor and the author's inability to take anything serious threw it off track.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was intense. The language was rich and beautiful and so was the jungle. But it also contained cruelty that was difficult to swallow and a window into the pitfalls of power and destruction of humans. The humor got me through the bad parts swimmingly though.

[Jgrace · Rating 4 out of 5]

The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts – Louis De Bernieres
4 stars

“Life is nothing if not a random motion of coincidences and quirks of chance; it never goes as planned or as foretold; frequently one gains happiness from being obliged to follow an unchosen path or misery from following a chosen one. “ Louis De Bernieres – The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts


I’m reading Bernieres backward. I started with Birds Without Wings and I’ve been working my way backward through his publication history. This book (which must be a contender for “Best Title of the 20th century”) was published in 1990. It was a very ambitious first novel. In an author’s note, Bernieres states that he has created an imaginary Latin American country with history, topography and language jumbled up from various sources. There are nearly 40 characters whose lives intersect in a story that includes guerilla war, military corruption, paranormal intervention, brutality, passion, outrageous humor and biting satire.

A book this complex should be read with great attention. The need for attention to detail is not immediately apparent. Characters and situations are introduced in short, well-constructed passages that seem only loosely connected. At the beginning it is easy to read briefly about one character, put the book down and come back to it much later. I did this several times, but I lost out on the connections and found that I had difficulty with pivotal events when I could not remember each character’s significance. The book improved when I sat down to read for longer periods of time. I was able to grasp the intricate web of intertwined lives that Bernieres was building.

I was mildly disappointed that Don Emmanuel’s nether parts play a very minor role in the story. In a very round about way, it is essentially the story of an impoverished, insignificant village and its hilariously devious victory over the corrupt and brutal military establishment. It is a temporary victory. I found the surreal salvation of the village to be the weakest part of the story. The best parts concern individual characters who are drawn realistically, but with great affection and humor. As in his later books, Bernieres has an underlying social agenda. He touches on the implications of United States covert military intervention, drug trafficking, the Falklands Island conflict, and international pressure concerning ‘Los Deseparecidos”.

There are a great many similarities between this book and the later Birds Without Wings. It even begins with the death of a bird, in this case, a vulture. The later book is stronger and I’ve tried to define why I think so. The biggest difference is the use of first person narrative. Bernieres allowed the many characters of Eskibahce to speak for themselves. The characters in Don Emmanuel’s fictional country did not speak up in their own voices. They are wonderful characters, but they stayed in the book and did not come alive for me in the same way.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Louis de Bernières debut, and first part of a trilogy, is a rough blueprint of what he would do in future novels.

The War… begins in a Latin American country where a rich lady, Dona Costanza wants to drain a river for her swimming pool. This enrages the locals and they revolt. In turn the government dispatches an army to settle things down. There are many more side plots but the one mentioned is the more prominent plotline.

Eventually Dona Constanza is kidnapped and joins a guerrilla group and becomes empowered while the army is getting more corrupt. At the same time the villagers start a pilgrimage to a better land (which contains giant cats).

As a satire I think it works. De Bernières portrays the corrupt undertakings of this Latin American government: from bribes to tortures. Having read novels about The Dominican Republic and Cuba, I think the events which happen are not as cartoonish as they seem but there is dark humor injected.

My problem is that it is too messy. Having a huge cast of characters and many storylines bogs the book down. There’s too much exposition, some unnecessary characters and the book really comes into it’s own midway. I would say that some parts are overwritten. I am keeping in mind that this is a first novel so it’s not perfect and de Bernières did manage to control the messiness of this debut with Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Birds without Wings. As I have acquired the next two volumes of the trilogy, I am curious to see how his style will change.

[Cheryl Wolfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book! It was so fun to read, the characters so colorful! I would love to see this made into a movie, but the book is wonderful because you'd never fit all of that into a couple hours. There are a thousand small stories here, deep little vignettes which make the book feel very layered, and each of them entertaining. It is set in the jungle and on the plains and in the mountains. The magic starts gradually, with the cats slowly becoming larger than normal cats, all the way to--- well, I can't give that away, but it is fun as hell and very satisfying. This is a story about dingleberries. This is a book about wars and revolutions, religion, alchemy, farming, tricks and politics. So of course there are lots of dead bodies, torture, rape, human trafficking and economics. But there are heroic men and women, who are also human and superhuman/magical in the end. There is love and sex, and families and zombies to help build the new city Cochadebajo de los Gatos. The ending is satisfying and also the beginning of more stories I hope to read soon.

[Madhurabharatula Pranav Rohit Kasinath · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bernieres is one of my favourite authors - he has written two of my favourite books of all time - Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Birds Without Wings. There is no one better suited for the epic historical novel, capable of writing in a heartfelt manner about everyday people faced with circumstances and events outside of their control threatening to uproot their life.
In Captain Corelli's Mandolin, his focus was on a small Grecian town during the Second World War while in Birds Without Wings he concentrated his attention on the Armenian Genocide and the cruelty inherent in religious violence.
The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether parts reveals the seeds of greatness in Bernieres while displaying the lack of restraint and excess that seem to characterise first time authors. Also, personally, I am not a fan of magical realism and Bernieres is at his best when he approaches history as it was and not as he wishes it would be.
I will definitely read the sequels, in my own time.