The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts

by Louis de Bernieres

Overview

This rambunctious first novel by the author of the bestselling Corelli's Mandolin is set in an impoverished, violent, yet ravishingly beautiful country somewhere in South America. When the haughty Dona Constanza decides to divert a river to fill her swimming pool, the consequences are at once tragic, heroic, and outrageously funny. "Walks a precarious edge between slapstick and pathos, never once losing its balance."—Washington Post Book World.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375700132
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/29/1997
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.24(w) x 7.92(h) x 0.82(d)

About the Author

Louis de Bernieres' novels include The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best First Book Eurasia Region, 1991), Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord (Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best Book Eurasia Region, 1992), and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman. The author, who lives in London, was selected as one of the twenty Best of Young British Novelists 1993.

Editorial Reviews

Walks a precarious edge between slapstick and pathos, never once losing its balance.

Washington Post Book World

From its style, one would assume that The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts is Latin American magical realism, expertly rendered into English. Yet the author is British, and his book is a riposte that merits translation into a Romance language....Fought by means of guerrillas, soldiers, pranks, spells, venereal disease, Spanish muskets, M-16's and a bulldozer, it's a comedy—and tragedy—of errors. The novel's pace is brisk, its prose epigrammatic. Farcical incidents alternate with graphic descriptions of torture, ribald sex scenes with tender love stories, political satire with supernatural events....Mr. de Bernieres is funnier than most magical realists, and more hopeful—perhaps too optimistic, in spite of the grimness of his political and military satire.
—The New York Times

Susan Lowell

Louis de Bernieres is the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh.
—The Evening Standard

A. S. Byatt