Revolution

I had wanted to read this for a while.  Got it sent to the nearest library branch; then forgot about it.  Saw it yesterday at another library branch. Checked it out; read it.

Why did I want to read it? I’m not sure. It struck me there might be some points in common between the author and me.  She’s a little younger than I, but still.  I didn’t go to find revolution in Central America, but still.

That youthful urgency of idealism mixed with the search for self? That results in our being someplace different twenty – thirty- years hence, looking back and barely able to recognize whoever it was who was back there then? Doing those things?

As it turns out, I was a little bit right.  For the first part of it, I was right.

In 1987, Deb Unferth ran off with a boyfriend to the revolutions in Central America. Whatever they could find.  She had been raised an agnostic Jew, the boyfriend was an earnest Christian, so that’s what she though she was too: a Calvinist-Marxist-Kierkegaardian Christian.

Revolution is her memoir of that year spent drifting, being ill, helping in an orphanage, building bikes, being sick again, taping interviews, and observing the foreigners come to Nicaragua for the revolution.

The style of the book is sketchy and brief and episodic, which made sense to me because it was a memoir told two decades later – and if you wrote a memoir about what happened to you twenty years ago…what would that be like?

And there are good stories and incisive, honest  observations about the chaos, about the craziness of these intense,purposeful drifters, about a girl slowly realizing – so slowly – why she ended up in this place.

I lost interest during the last quarter of the book, much of which revolves around events closer to the present, events which do, indeed, close chapters but are not quite as interesting and come down as more self-indulgent.

Revolution is a good way to spend an evening, an engaging way to retrace your own steps as you try to figure out how you got from there to here yourself.

Advertisement