Pedro Nolasco (alias The Shadow) organizes a reunion of sorts in a garage with Cacho, Lolo, and Lucho (names with echoes of a comedy troupe), his former Chilean revolutionary companions from the Allende era 40 years after they've last seen one another. Unfortunately, Pedro fails to show up at the rendezvous when a record player accidentally falls on his head (the past once again intruding?). The three remaining ex-anarchists are joined by Coco, who steals the gun from Pedro's corpse, the same weapon that was used by an ancestor to commit the so-called first robbery in Chile. The fearless foursome proceed to recover an old cash box that lay hidden behind a brick wall. Scattered throughout the text are vague references to the repression executed under the Pinochet regime, offset by attempts at black humor. VERDICT Neither recalling the horrors of the Pinochet regime nor the Keystone Kops-style robbery is a literary novelty. Sepúlveda also fails to provide a satisfactory ending. Though the author has been critically acclaimed (and this novel awarded a minor literary award), this work is not among his best.—Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib.
Former Chilean revolutionaries reunite as bumbling conspirators in this novella by Sepúlveda (The Name of a Bullfighter, 1996, etc.).
The author, a former political prisoner in Chile now living in Spain, opens the book in 1925 with a bank robbery in Santiago, one committed in the spirit of Robin Hood ("This is a robbery, but we are not thieves"). The story then flashes forward to contemporary Santiago, for an incident that provides what little plot there is. Coco Aravena, a grandson of one of those original robbers, faces eviction from his apartment, because of, as his wife charges, his "laziness, depression, disillusionment, lack of ambition, contempt for work and possible lack of decency." His wife angrily starts tossing their possessions onto the sidewalk, including a phonograph player that strikes a pedestrian and kills him. The dead man has a gun. Coco takes it. Someone else takes the dead man's shoes. Coco schemes to invent a scenario in which their apartment was ransacked and whoever robbed them also killed the pedestrian. He also reunites with three former friends who had been militant supporters of Salvador Allende, until his overthrow by a coup in 1973 forced them underground, even into exile. They now look different and have different values. Some of this novel is very funny, such as a passing reference to "the strict morality of the anarchists" and a long soliloquy on the execrable quality of Chilean coffee. Some of it is serious, such as the invocation of the "immutable land of memory" and the admonition that Chileans need to "stop being wimps afraid of our own past." But much of it plainly means more to the author and his Chilean readership than to those reading this English translation.
The past is present in this political novel, which requires greater knowledge of Chile's politics and recent history than American readers are likely to bring to it.
