In Deb Olin Unferth’s writing, the only thing you can count on is that nothing is predictable. The result, writes David Ulin, is fiction as surprising and exciting as life itself.
Rising literary star Deb Olin Unferth offers a new twist on the coming-of-age memoir in this utterly unique and captivating story of the year she ran away from college with her Christian boyfriend and followed him to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas.
Despite their earnest commitment to a myriad of revolutionary causes and to each other, the couple find themselves unwanted, unhelpful, and unprepared as they bop around Central America, looking for "revolution jobs." The year is 1987, a turning point in the Cold War. The East-West balance has begun to tip, although the world doesn't know it yet, especially not Unferth and her fiancé (he proposes on a roadside in El Salvador). The months wear on and cracks begin to form in their relationship: they get fired, they get sick, they run out of money, they grow disillusioned with the revolution and each other. But years later the trip remains fixed in her mind and she finally goes back to Nicaragua to try to make sense of it all. Unferth's heartbreaking and hilarious memoir perfectly captures the youthful search for meaning, and is an absorbing rumination on what happens to a country and its people after the revolution is over.
Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War
Rising literary star Deb Olin Unferth offers a new twist on the coming-of-age memoir in this utterly unique and captivating story of the year she ran away from college with her Christian boyfriend and followed him to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas.
Despite their earnest commitment to a myriad of revolutionary causes and to each other, the couple find themselves unwanted, unhelpful, and unprepared as they bop around Central America, looking for "revolution jobs." The year is 1987, a turning point in the Cold War. The East-West balance has begun to tip, although the world doesn't know it yet, especially not Unferth and her fiancé (he proposes on a roadside in El Salvador). The months wear on and cracks begin to form in their relationship: they get fired, they get sick, they run out of money, they grow disillusioned with the revolution and each other. But years later the trip remains fixed in her mind and she finally goes back to Nicaragua to try to make sense of it all. Unferth's heartbreaking and hilarious memoir perfectly captures the youthful search for meaning, and is an absorbing rumination on what happens to a country and its people after the revolution is over.
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Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War
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Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War
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by Deb Olin Unferth
Deb Olin Unferth
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Overview
Rising literary star Deb Olin Unferth offers a new twist on the coming-of-age memoir in this utterly unique and captivating story of the year she ran away from college with her Christian boyfriend and followed him to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas.
Despite their earnest commitment to a myriad of revolutionary causes and to each other, the couple find themselves unwanted, unhelpful, and unprepared as they bop around Central America, looking for "revolution jobs." The year is 1987, a turning point in the Cold War. The East-West balance has begun to tip, although the world doesn't know it yet, especially not Unferth and her fiancé (he proposes on a roadside in El Salvador). The months wear on and cracks begin to form in their relationship: they get fired, they get sick, they run out of money, they grow disillusioned with the revolution and each other. But years later the trip remains fixed in her mind and she finally goes back to Nicaragua to try to make sense of it all. Unferth's heartbreaking and hilarious memoir perfectly captures the youthful search for meaning, and is an absorbing rumination on what happens to a country and its people after the revolution is over.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429992121 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 225 KB |
About the Author
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the story collection Minor Robberies and the novel Vacation, winner of the 2009 Cabell First Novelist Award and a New York Times Book Review Critics' Choice. Her work has been featured in Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Believer, and the Boston Review. She has received two Pushcart Prizes and a 2009 Creative Capital grant for Innovative Literature. She teaches at Wesleyan University and currently lives in New York.
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the story collection Minor Robberies and the novel Vacation, winner of the 2009 Cabell First Novelist Award and a New York Times Book Review Critics' Choice. Her work has been featured in Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Believer, and the Boston Review. She has received two Pushcart Prizes and a 2009 Creative Capital grant for Innovative Literature and was a Harper's Bazaar Editors' Choice: Name to Know in 2011. She teaches at Wesleyan University and currently lives in New York.
Read an Excerpt
Revolution
The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War
By Deb Olin Unferth
Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2011 Deb Olin UnferthAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-9212-1
CHAPTER 1
PART ONE
THE NEW WORLD
MCDONALD'S
I had food in my heart and mind that morning. My parents had said they'd pick George and me up at the border and take us anywhere we wanted to eat. I wanted to go to McDonald's. My father thought that was funny. Part of his story for a long time was how the first place I wanted to go when I came back from fomenting the Communist revolution was McDonald's. Hey, to me at that moment, McDonald's looked pretty good. We'd seen McDonald's in Mexico, of course, and Honduras and other places, but we hadn't been able to afford it. Now, approaching the border, I was thinking about that lighted menu board. I was thinking about how I already knew what the food I ordered would look like. I knew what the French fries would look like, what the containers would look like, although I'd never been to that particular McDonald's. I knew what I'd get when I got a sundae. That seemed like a neat and attractive trick to me now. There would be toilet paper in the bathrooms. And soap. There were the little songs on TV, the McDonald's songs that people all over the world knew and I had sung when I was a kid, the Big Mac chant, the Hamburglar. George was asleep beside me, had slept through the last seven hours of desert. "George, wake up," I said. "We're going to McDonald's."
POPULAR PRIEST
My boyfriend and I went to join the revolution.
We couldn't find the first revolution.
The second revolution hired us on and then let us go.
We went to the other revolutions in the area — there were several — but every one we came to let us hang around for a few weeks and then made us leave.
We ran out of money and at last we came home.
I was eighteen. That's the whole story.
* * *
George and I were walking through a shantytown. Two weeks into Mexico, the beginning of our trip, and we were outside Mexico City. An American priest walked ahead. He was saying hello to people and taking their hands. He was saying good-bye to them and waving. Que te vaya bien. Adiós. Dios te bendiga. They chimed back. We walked a long way, following this priest.
It was 1987, and at that time these little liberation theology institutes were set up all over Latin America, "popular churches," they were called, short chapels with small gardens, places for people to get together and help usher in the revolution. The priests were in charge and they could be from anywhere — South America, Spain, the States — but most were from down the street. We liked to drop in when we found these setups. We interviewed whoever happened to be hanging around and we borrowed books from their shelves and got the people to take us out. We liked to get the scoop.
So we'd met this priest at his instituto and he'd brought us to the shantytown. He was doing some work, fixing up some floors. He thought we just might like to see.
When you think of a shantytown, you imagine a few square blocks of board and tin, some chickens running through, but it's a whole city, a thousand thin paths, kilometers and kilometers of housewives standing outside askew miniature-sized houses, not a window pane in sight, the air moist and buzzing.
"These people are born and die here," the priest was telling us. "They have no way to get out." He raised his hand to show us where they had to stay.
"Well, at least they've got their little houses," I said. I was impressed with how tidy it all was. "Some have less than that."
The priest looked over at me.
Then he was gone. Just like that. Left George and me standing by a flower of electrical cords coming out of a pole.
We waited a while. Roosters called to each other in the distance. Then we started puzzling around the shacks, trying to find our way back. We were soon lost. We felt stupid and rude walking along, a couple of idiot gringos slapping at the mosquitoes and grinning. We were sad about the priest. Why had he gone away? He'd left us and we deserved it. We'd been bad-mannered. I'd been bad-mannered, according to George. George knew better than to say a thing like that. Oh yeah? I said. Then why had the priest left George here with me?
These priests for the liberation. You did not want to mess with them. Latin America was swinging to the left, hoisted on pulleys by these radical priests, and some said the Vatican was to blame. In 1962 the pope had summoned the world's bishops to Rome for the Vatican Two Council, to talk about how to renew the Church, how to be relevant to the laypeople. The story goes that the bishops met each fall for four years. They talked about things like how perhaps they should not say mass in Latin anymore because no one understood it (although the entire conference took place in Latin). Some of the South American bishops and priests thought that one way to renew the Church was to organize the lay into groups, maybe even guerrilla armies, and then rise up and overthrow their governments. Soon a continent of priests was storing weapons and reading Marx in the name of Vatican Two. They turned their churches into revolutionary enclaves and invited students to come live in them like a herd of hippies. Some priests held secret meetings with guerrilla rebels. Some manned radio frequencies that kept tabs on the national guard. And when the skirmishes began, some priests came out shooting. Every day their chapels filled with citizens, and the priests never stopped talking about Vatican Two, the theology of liberation, how the Church was a socialist soldier for the poor, and how grateful they were for this mandate from God. Of course the pope didn't mean to produce an infantry of gun-touting South American priests, and he said so, but it was too late.
* * *
Late for the pope, but early for George and me. This priest was the first of his kind, we'd found. We walked, lost, through the shantytown. Houses tacked up to each other with clothes hangers, a cobweb of roofs held down with tires. Outhouses winged out over the river. Lightless rooms, cardboard town. We began getting upset at seeing how poor the people were, now that we were looking more carefully. Ladies and kids stopped us and pointed in different directions, laughing behind their hands. A few folks followed us. We handed out all of our bills. We didn't see how we would ever find our way back. George was taking us in circles. Oh, right, he said, he was taking us in circles, perfect. We began to panic.
Suddenly the priest was there, stepped out in front of us. Ho ho. He'd stopped in to look at a floor he and some friends had put in. Lost track of us.
What, had we been nervous about getting stuck here? he wondered. About not being able to get out?
"Okay, okay, we get it already," we said, though we did not.
LONG YEAR FOR WAR
We had wanted to go to Cuba, but we didn't know how to get there. George and I had very little money and we weren't resourceful, and it was illegal to go, which was awkward. Besides, there was no action there anymore. Just parades and congratulations and prisoners. Nicaragua had a very good revolution too. They'd won their revolution, for one thing, and they were in the papers all the time, and we could ride the bus there. They also had Russians.
The other revolutions — in El Salvador and Panama, in Guatemala, in Honduras — weren't revolutions proper, more like civil wars, military coups, and armed uprisings. They straggled along with their broken tanks and their camps in the jungle. We believed their revolutions were on the way.
Nineteen eighty-seven was a big year for war in Central America. Still, it took George and me a while to find any. We rode through Mexico on bus rides that lasted eighteen hours, twenty-two hours, twenty-six hours. We passed through Guatemala, where we had to fight our way through the tourists just to see a little scrap of the land. The tourists crowded together like shrubs, trying not to get knocked over. Mostly in Guatemala we were herded by heavily armed soldiers along a well-worn track that took us from pretty spot to pretty spot (look at the Indians! buy their amusing costumes to take home for yourself! ride a wooden boat across a glassy lake!).
People didn't have the details on Guatemala yet. We heard about the killings but we didn't know the extent and the scale. Or maybe we did know and chose not to understand. A couple of years later, when we began to hear so much about the death squads, the scorched earth policy, the tens of thousands of dead, the tens of thousands fleeing the country, I had a sick feeling of knowledge. A massacre, an exodus, going on all around us, had been for years, and still going on after we'd gone, and we saw none of it. We saw a few tattered labor protests, Indians sitting on cardboard in the plaza. Mostly we saw soldiers. Soldiers were in all the shops and banks, on the buses and in the cafés. There were pageants of them on the street. They stopped taxis and leaned in the windows. "Papeles," they said every minute or two. They held machine guns and wore camouflage uniforms, high black boots, helmets, strings of bullets across their chests. On their belts they carried clubs, pistols, Mace, hand grenades.
They were small and young and cute, like toy soldiers. Many only came up to my mouth. They stood and looked at us in moody silence. Poked at the pages of my passport. Sometimes they would pose for a picture.
* * *
In those days the Guatemalans still thought they owned Belize or thought they owned it more than they think they own it now, so many of us secretly felt that Belize didn't count. In any case Belize didn't have a revolution. But we went to have a look.
These were the days before the Peace Corps had been let back into the country. The days before Belize had even kicked the Peace Corps out. These were the original Peace Corps days, the days that led to their expulsion from Belize. They were all over the place, the Peace Corps volunteers, drunk in hammocks, lying on the sidewalks. "Hang on, man," they called to us. "Want a smoke?" George and I picked our steps over them on the way to the bus station.
* * *
Our main ambition was to help the revolution. George and I wanted jobs, what we called "revolution jobs," but it turned out that few people wanted to hire us and if they did, they almost immediately fired us.
But he and I also conducted interviews. This was his idea, and he was in charge. We started in Mexico and interviewed people clear down to the Panama Canal, dozens of people — politicians, priests, organizers. We brought a bagful of tapes with rock music on them and recorded over the tapes one by one with a handheld cassette tape recorder. Some people gave us only twenty minutes — the press secretary of Guatemala (with his fake, thin clown smile), the minister of culture of Nicaragua (who wore a beret indoors). The strays — the artist, the small-town priest, the local Native American — would talk for hours if we let them (if George let them). In Nicaragua everyone wanted to be interviewed, top people in the government and church. The taxi drivers wanted to be interviewed. The kids wanted to be interviewed. Their fathers wanted to be interviewed. In Bluefields, Nicaragua, we interviewed the mayor of the city, the leader of the Miskito tribe, the soldiers who had provided military escort to that part of the country. In El Salvador no one wanted to be interviewed. We got only four interviews — one with a painter, a few with some priests — but no one in the government would talk to us or even look at us. We went to the Casa Presidencial in San Salvador every day for weeks and couldn't get near the place. The guards told us that the entire government was on vacation. Every day they told us this. "Still on vacation," they said, spreading their hands. "¿Lo crees? Can you believe it?"
"No, I cannot believe that," said George.
* * *
I don't know what happened to all those tapes. When we came back to the States, we had them first in plastic bags on the floor by the door of our apartment. Later I recall them sitting in a couple of broken boxes. After that, I'm not sure. Neither of us ever listened to them again, as far as I know.
SEND-OFF
I knew my mother and father were not going to let me join the revolution, so I didn't tell them. I sent them a letter from Mexico. I wrote the letter in Nogales on the American side of the border, then I crossed the border so I could mail it from the Nogales post office on the Mexican side. The letter was short and went something like:
Dear Mom and Dad,
I am writing you from Mexico. I'm sorry to tell you in this way, but I've left school and am going to help foment the revolution. I am a Christian now and I have been called by God. Due to the layout of the land, we are taking the bus.
My father still talks about it. "She told us nothing," he says. "We had no idea. I open the mailbox and there's a letter from Mexico saying she's off to foment the revolution."
He's been telling it the same way all these years. He used to shout it, "My own daughter told me nothing!" and point at me — there she is, the traitor, the nutcase, the smartass.
Later he said it sadly, shaking his head: "I had no idea."
Even later he said it with pride. His loony girl, a bit like him. Do you know he once owned a Communist bookstore?
Now he tells it like an old joke. "So one day I open the mailbox ..."
* * *
Before we left, George brought the stuff we would need up out of his parents' basement — backpacks, insect repellent, flashlights, soap, some philosophical books about the Bible. I threw my other belongings away and I did it happily because at the revolution I would need only what I could carry. We put our money together (we each had a thousand dollars). We got shots and a bottle of malaria pills.
George told his mother our plan. We sat at her kitchen table while he explained. She listened and then took out some pot holders for us to take along and bookmarks with pictures of God on them. She had the face of captive royalty, the voice of something gentle in a cage. She told me to memorize the Bible bit by bit and then to write it down at the revolution and send it to her in the mail. We left the pot holders behind, but she also gave us a very large, very heavy canister of vitamin powder that we never used but carried for months and months over borders, on boats, through storms.
George's father was there too that day but he didn't speak. I never saw him speak, in fact, and it seemed to me that no one had. The man sat looking angry, alone on the sofa in the living room. He rose only to come through the kitchen on his way to the door.
* * *
The year George and I went was nearly the end of the revolution, but the way it looked to us, we were arriving at the very beginning. A new world order. Everybody in the world was talking about the revolution, how it was coming over the ocean, it was floating up through Texas. It would spread over America. People were writing their ideas in the papers. But two years later the Berlin Wall came down and soon after that the Sandinistas were gone, the Cold War was over, and the guerrillas in El Salvador handed in their arms, put down their names on a peace accord. By the time we arrived, the Communist decay had set in, but we didn't know. There were a lot of people like us on the scene.
CHAPTER 2PART TWO
CIVIL WAR
BODIES
George and I were on a bus headed into El Salvador, a secret bus in the middle of the night. Soft bundles of people sat on each seat, but the space was so voiceless and dim, you'd think we were all gone and the bus rode emptily along. And yet the bus was heavy, pulling itself up hills around bends. You could feel the brakes holding back the weight as we coasted down. I was angry with George. "This is not going to work," I told him. Dark windows, the weird sound of cicadas. An occasional wet branch hit the glass. George said nothing.
The bus shuddered through a downshift and rolled to a stop. We'd run only a few kilometers over the border so far. The people in the seats around us began murmuring and shifting at the windows because out on the road we could see men with machine guns filed out in front of the bus and walking along the sides.
* * *
It was too bad that we wanted to take the bus to El Salvador. We weren't allowed on the roads. No one was. No foreigners were even allowed in the country at that time, unofficially — save a few special exceptions, and there certainly wasn't anything special about George and me, but we'd managed to get in. We'd lined up a job, although that hadn't gotten us in. Then we'd been persistent. Long after the other gringos had given up, had gone staggering off to Honduras (visit the islands! see the ruinas, cheap!), we were still there at the consulate, every day, with our passports, but that hadn't done it either. Finally we figured out a trick they were playing on us involving the papers we needed to get into the country. And even then we hadn't gotten normal visas. El Salvador wasn't giving out plain come-as-you-are visas — what do you think this is, a party? We had overland visas with a three-day window for entrance, which meant you had to come through the land, not drop in from the sky or swim the sea, and you had three days to make it. But either by coincidence (unlikely) or in yet another round of diversions, they'd given us the visas on the very day the rebels of El Salvador — the FMLN, the leftist guerrillas of the mountains — had announced on the radio that their plan was to halt any vehicle they found on the road and blow it up. This was called a "paro," a "stop," because things that move stop moving in the face of threatened destruction. Buses, cars, trucks, everyone stopped and stayed home, the roads were tenantless as housetops. We'd gone anyway. (Not my idea.)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Revolution by Deb Olin Unferth. Copyright © 2011 Deb Olin Unferth. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Cover,Title Page,
Dedication,
Part One: The New World,
McDonald's,
Popular Priest,
Long Year For War,
Send-Off,
Part Two: Civil War,
Bodies,
Typical Man,
Spanish,
Job,
Projects,
The Evangelicals,
Hermana Mana,
Oh Brother,
On the Road,
Love,
Visitors,
Broken City,
Wonderful Time,
Good Ideas,
Engaged,
Parade,
Heaven,
Clean,
Part Three: Internacionalista,
Sarah's,
Sandalista,
Chart Day,
Feminism,
Doctors,
Bicicletas Sí, Bombas No,
Nervous,
More or Less, 2001,
Part Four: Sick of the Revolution,
Tiresome,
Black Market,
To Bluefields,
Capitalism,
Paradise,
Fever,
What I Remember of Panama,
Sixty Bucks,
Early Writings,
Water,
Censorship,
Peanut Butter,
Smaller,
Forgettable Moments,
What Happened to George,
Part Five: Common Human Fates,
Stuff,
Sandino in the Sky,
Where the Danes Stayed,
Three Boats,
Good Sport,
In the Movie of Your Life,
Fathers,
Proposals,
The Last We Saw of George,
Part Six: Big Country,
Private Eye,
Another Ending,
Final Robbery,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,
Also by Deb Olin Unferth,
Copyright,
What People are Saying About This
From the Publisher
"This is a very funny, excoriatingly honest story of being young, semi-idealistic, stupid and in love. If you have ever been any of these things, you'll devour it."—Dave Eggers
"Deb Olin Unferth is one of the most ambitious and inspirational writers working today. Her memoir of idealistic, bewildered people-in-training befell me like a fever for which, I'm happy to report, there appears to be no cure. An encounter with Unferth's prose is to be permanently, wondrously afflicted by its genius."—Heidi Julavits, author of The Uses of Enchantment
"Revolution is the best of many worlds: misconceived youth, sharp humor and sharper characters, and mostly, for me, the chance to witness a brand of paragraph-to-paragraph artistry that is much too rare."—John Brandon, author of Citrus County
"Brave, soulful...Unferth has a distinct, droll voice. Reading her is like listening to a girlfriend burning with gin-fueled enlightenment."—The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice Pick)
Revolution calls itself a memoir, but it's something altogether stranger and more dazzling: It's a virtuosic one-woman show....It's smart, stylish, compulsive reading: memoir at its best."—Time Out New York
"Unferth writes with a sly, understated appreciation for the absurd...A dryly humorous memoir of love, travel and wide-eyed idealism."—Kirkus
"This clearheaded and funny memoir captures the grit and chaos of a tumultuous moment in Central American history, but it's really a coming-of-age story...[Unferth] didn't become a revolutionary, but she did become a grown-up."—Mother Jones
“Unferth’s application of her imagination to her subject…evokes what David Forster Wallace referred to as ‘the click,’ a feeling one gets when reading work that’s firing on all cylinders.”—Bookforum
"Hers is a bildungsroman for the Believer set, a portrait of the artist as a young and clueless revolutionary."—The New York Observer
"Unferth's prose remains as sure and slicing as a machete, clearing a path through a jungle of emotions...A memoir of unique lucidity, wit, and power."—Booklist
Reading Group Guide
Michael Kimball Interviews Deb Olin Unferth
Michael Kimball:
I think of you as a ?ction writer ?rst, probably because that is how I ?rst encountered you, but Revolution is a memoir, so I'm wondering about the differences between writing ?ction and memoir. I'm asking because there are certain incidents that I wouldn't have believed if I were reading ?ction, but I read along amazed because I'm reading a memoir.
Deb Olin Unferth:
When I decided to write Revolution, I read dozens of memoirs and autobiographies to try to get a sense of how memoirs are put together, how they have changed over the past hundred years, how I might contribute to the conversation that "memoir" is--which is really a conversation about memory and its mishaps, time, the narrative of the self, and much more. I'd been terri?ed to write a memoir. I'd told myself this was because I doubted its intellectual validity (ha!), but I see now it was because I didn't want to deal with the problems memoir presents.
A few of these are: the search for and commitment to factual and emotional truth; the willingness to reveal oneself publicly; the need to settle on one "self " or one interpretation of what happened; the ?lter--what sort of a ?lter to use (you must use a ?lter! you can't just write down every single thing that ever happened to you) and why you use that particular ?lter, and how to tell the reader what that ?lter is and what doubts you have about it--the need to resist building an arti?cial but tempting arc (life doesn't work as an arc, even though almost all of our experiences with human-made narrative do), et cetera. None of these are problems in quite the same way in ?ction.
Kimball:
This is why I love interviews. Let's talk about the ?lter. I think we use a ?lter in ?ction, too. There's a pretty clear ?lter in your novel, Vacation, and the ?lters are even more obvious in your short stories. Can you talk about the particular ?lter that you used in Revolution and the doubts that you had about it?
Unferth:
The hardest part was determining the voice I wanted to use--a voice is a ?lter. What sort of a stance did I want to take toward this subject? I had many doubts. After all, here I was, an American, turning up at someone else's war and trying to "help," and, all these years later, here I was writing about it (and writing about something is, in a way, owning it or laying claim to it). It takes a lot of audacity to do that. Furthermore, I wanted to have a sense of humor about it, mostly because I feel like I can only speak seriously through a ?lter of humor. And what kind of a person would write humorously about someone else's war? It seemed inhuman, and yet I wanted it to be very human, and very respectful. For this reason, I abandoned the book over and over, but it felt urgent to me to ?nish it, and urgent on many levels, so I kept returning to it. All I could think to do was to integrate my doubts into the text, be very open about it.
Kimball:
The voice, the tone of the voice, is one of the things that is striking about the book. Some of what happens in the narrative seems so terrible or so absurd that humor seemed necessary--that is, the narrative would have seemed unbelievable without that sort of temper for it. Said another way, there are places where the narrative seems both earnest and ironic at the same time. Do you think of that as one of the ways that Revolution contributes to the conversation of what a memoir is--or, what a memoir can be?
Unferth:
Well, I hope so. I wanted to capture that feeling of simultaneous earnestness and irony. It's the way I tend to feel most of the time--urgently earnest and yet aware of the absurdity of earnestness. Even then, at eighteen, I felt that way, though the feeling was a little deeper below the surface. I try to get that across in places in the book, such as when I call my family to tell them I'm getting married and I feel a sudden surge of terror that I might not mean what I'm saying and doing the way George does.
I don't believe irony precludes deep emotion in writing, the way some people say. Irony can indicate deep emotion--pain, fear, doubt, strangling desire. The important thing is not to stop at irony. Let the irony curtain fall around you, then push it away (it comes away so easily!) and look at what it hid.
Kimball:
One of the fascinating things about Revolution is the way that this shifting perspective happens in so many places, on so many pages--and it kind of teaches the reader to read the book in a particular way. This is partly possible, I think, because of the subject matter--we're given a narrative with a very personal, idiosyncratic story that is set against a backdrop of a narrative that might be told in a history book. What I'm wondering is how you decided to balance these two narratives--how much of the political revolution versus how much of the personal revolution?
Unferth:
The book began and stopped in ?ts and starts over a period of many years while I tried to ?gure out just what sort of book I wanted to write. I had written drafts of scenes of both the war material and the personal material. I had, scattered all over, pieces of scenes and mini history lessons I'd written. They were in different boxes and on scraps of paper, some typed into e-mails I sent to myself from Central America in the early 2000s, some in notebooks starting with the ones I'd written during the 1987 trip. Because I'd tried so many times to write this book, I'd done a lot of research over the years, also in ?ts and starts. I'd say there were four distinct periods when I read almost exclusively books about Central American politics, and I took extensive notes and made hundreds of note cards. (I'd been taught to do this in eighth grade: When writing a research paper, put all your facts on note cards. Probably no one does that anymore, right? Why have them on note cards anyway? What's the point? It's mysterious.)
When I ?nally decided what I wanted to do and surveyed the mountain of material, somehow the balance came very naturally and organically. I didn't have that much trouble ?guring that part of it out. I did not want the book to be a history book. I did want the political backdrop to be an important part of the book. The challenges were: 1. ?guring out how much background information to put in (I initially assumed a lot was common knowledge--that turned out not to be--so I needed to ?ll it out a little), 2. including the factual information in a way that didn't lose my voice.
Reprinted with permission from The Faster Times.
From the B&N Reads Blog
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