★ 02/17/2020
Tobar’s stunning follow-up to Deep Down Dark draws from the unbelievable true story of Joe Sanderson, a peripatetic would-be-writer who left a comfortable existence in Urbana, Ill., in order to travel the world in search of material for a great American novel. Instead, he found romance, danger, and the dark heart of the mid-20th century. After falling in love with life on the road in 1960 as a high school senior traveling alone in Mexico City, Joe hitchhikes his way across Jamaica, narrowly escaping a government crackdown on the Rastas he’d fallen in with. Then it’s on to South America, where Joe embraces the life of a vagabond before setting out again and experiencing historical events across the globe. In Saigon, he surveys the aftermath of the Tet Offensive; and in Biafra, he crisscrosses war zones in emulation of his heroes Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. All the while, Joe begins writing and occasionally finishes unpublishable novels with titles like The Prince of Castaways, Caledonia, and The Silver Triangle. Working from a massive archive of Sanderson’s letters, journals, and doomed forays into fiction, Tobar discovers the real story in Joe’s life, following him into his fateful decision to join the paramilitary rebels in El Salvador. Throughout, Joe appears in footnotes to dispute the veracity of the account of Tobar, the “Guatemalan dude” who fictionalized his remarkable life. No matter; Tobar brilliantly succeeds in capturing Joe’s guileless yearning for adventure through high-velocity prose that is both relentless and wry. Tobar’s wild ride achieves a version of Kerouac for a new age. (June)
Praise for The Last Great Road Bum
“Héctor Tobar uses every method at his disposal to encircle the facts of the ‘conspicuous gringo’ whose archive landed in his lap. I’m in awe of the results, an alchemical amalgam of tender portraiture and illuminating context, with a voice full of riffs and references, and charming as hell. Tobar can seemingly do anything as a writer; here he bridges fiction and nonfiction effortlessly.” —Jonathan Lethem
“Tobar’s stunning follow-up to Deep Down Dark draws from the unbelievable true story of Joe Sanderson, a peripatetic would-be-writer who left a comfortable existence in Urbana, Ill., in order to travel the world in search of material for a great American novel. Instead, he found romance, danger, and the dark heart of the mid-20th century...Tobar brilliantly succeeds in capturing Joe’s guileless yearning for adventure through high-velocity prose that is both relentless and wry.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“The vividly realized particulars of [Joe Sanderson's] restless journeys are offered in Tobar's remarkable novelization of Sanderson's real life, his adventures and misadventures.... His life itself has inspired what is inarguably a great novel, a tribute to him that is beautifully written and spectacularly imagined. Tobar writes that it took him 11 years to complete this wonderful book. Readers will rejoice that he persisted.”
—Booklist, starred review
“The speed and respect and sensitivity with which Tobar can encapsulate a life is dazzling...The novel muses on who gets to tell stories as it probes the lines between myth and reality. This is first rate storytelling from a writer who deepens the sky with every book he writes.” —John Freeman, Lit Hub Summer Preview
Praise for Héctor Tobar
“A riveting story...[but] why it’s an extraordinary book is because of Héctor Tobar’s writing, which is so beautiful and so thoughtful that he’s taking on all of the big issues of life: what is life worth, what is the value of one human life, what is faith, who do we become in our darkest hour? He really brings this story to a level that I don’t feel anyone else could have done . . . It’s the best book of the year.” —Ann Patchett, NPR’s Morning Edition on Deep Down Dark
“Hector Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier brings the enmities of the Guatemalan civil war to the L.A. riots.” —Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times on The Tattooed Soldier
“[Tobar] succeeds in bringing into focus both the civil turmoil that racks Guatemala and the inner turmoil that can consume people anywhere.” —People, on The Tattooed Soldier
“A triumph . . . Crosswires de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America with Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries.” —Steve Erickson, New York Times Book Review, on Translation Nation
“A book of extraordinary scope and extraordinary power.” —Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times, on Barbarian Nurseries
“[Tobar] exhibits a seismographic sensitivity to the tensions along the fault lines of his cultural terrain . . . His illuminations become our recognitions.” —Rebecca Donner, The New York Times Book Review, on Barbarian Nurseries
“Both timely and timeless . . . Tobar continually creates moments of uncommon magic.” ?Elle, on Barbarian Nurseries
08/01/2020
An award-winning journalist (Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free) and novelist (The Barbarian Nurseries), Tobar was writing for the Los Angeles Times in 2008 when he uncovered the story of Joe Sanderson, an Illinois kid who left his home in the 1960s to wander the globe and write a great novel. Here, Tobar weaves Sanderson's diaries and letters into a novel about his life. Bouncing from country to country, Joe travels through war zones in Vietnam and joins the Red Cross in Biafra while remaining connected to his family in Urbana through letters and postcards. However, when Joe joins the guerrilla rebels in the Salvadoran civil war, his journey transforms from experiential to immersive, and his tether to his family, country, and ultimate objective loosens. VERDICT Tobar conjures the narrative spirit of Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums in juxtaposing the seeming placidity of the American Midwest and a life in search of truth and authenticity. [See Prepub Alert, 12/2/19.]—Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY
2020-03-15
A white Midwestern boy’s wanderlust sends him on an unlikely path around the world and deep into the Salvadoran revolution.
Tobar’s third novel is based on the true story of Joe Sanderson, who was, among other things, a failed writer; his overheated prose, appearing in letters home and rejected novels, is quoted often. But his copious journals and letters also provide a narrative throughline for this shaggy dog epic. Tobar stumbled upon Sanderson’s diary in El Salvador in 2008, and the author is plainly charmed by the story of an all-American gringo who gave up a comfortable upbringing to see the world. Born and raised in Urbana, Illinois, Joe caught the travel bug early, exploring nontourist pockets of Jamaica as a teen on a family vacation. After brief college and Army stints, he bummed rides through Central and South America, the Middle East, and Asia, witnessing the escalating Vietnam War and the famine in Biafra. Tobar renders Joe as naïve and dispassionate early on, a young man eagerly gathering fodder for his bad novels but not gaining much empathy. And though Tobar is a gifted storyteller in both fiction (The Barbarian Nurseries, 2011) and nonfiction (Deep Down Dark, 2014), his hero’s lack of emotional growth makes much of the heart of the novel draggy and listless. (Joe occasionally interrupts the narrative via footnotes in which he speaks directly to the reader, mentioning that Tobar’s editor and agent recommended he “trim the shit out of” the novel. True or not, it’s not bad advice.) The novel gains thrust and becomes more affecting in its final third, when Joe joins the anti-government revolutionaries in El Salvador in the late 1970s and early '80s; Tobar’s depiction of the 1981 El Mozote massacre is chilling and imagines a genuine shift in Joe’s character.
Though the protagonist will test your patience with his road stories, he has some great ones.
