#grass_gunter

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

(the lunacy of war, seen in a USAF base on a fantasy Mediterranean island during the second world war)

The Craziness of Command (you"ll laugh till you die)

Richard Hooker, M*A*S*H  (US doctors in Korea fighting insane conditions, boredom and gung-ho top brass)

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Peter George, Red Alert  (chain of command follies and failures triggers World War III)

Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny  (crew court-martialled for mutinying against insane World War II minesweeper captain)

Leslie Thomas, The Virgin Soldiers  (over-sexed, bewildered British conscripts in Far East)

Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Svejk  (World War I batman obeys every order, believes every lie, keeps out of trouble)

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity"s Rainbow  (what is top secret World War II establishment for? What is meaning of life? Should war (and sex) not be more fun than this?)

The World Gone Mad (laugh or cry, we live in an insane asylum)

Jersey Kosinski, Being There  (lame-brain gardener taken for political guru and saint)

Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?  (Sammy claws his way to the top; scum always floats)

Günter Grass, The Tin Drum  (nazism as an insane circus-parade watched by a gleeful, baby-brained adult)

Terry Southern, Candy  (virgin innocent abroad - neither innocent nor virgin for long)

Richard Condon, Mile High  (US power politics; a farcical orgy of sex, drugs, blackmail and murder)

Andrew Sinclair, Gog  (giant from past washed up in Scotland, travels to London, horrified at 20th-century "civilisation")

War Kills Our Young Men (war at the sharp end: brutal, unglorious, and pointless)

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front  (lives of four young men disrupted and ruined by brutality of World War I trench warfare)

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage  (young volunteer horrified but exhilarated by battle conditions in American Civil War)

Len Deighton, Bomber  (meticulous planning for a bombing-run over Germany in World War II)

Neville Shute, Landfall  (breakdown of young pilot who sinks "one of ours" by mistake)

Mario Vargas Llosa, The City and the Dogs/The Time of the Hero  (farcical tragedy of young cadets in 1950s Peruvian military academy)

Peruvian-born Chilean novelist (born 1942)

Allende’s first novel, The House of the Spirits (1985), was a glowing family tapestry in the magic-realist manner of Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, spanning five generations and thronged with larger-than-life characters and supernatural events. She followed this vein in Eva Luna, which is particularly evocative of life on a decaying hacienda deep in the tropical bush. Her finest book, Of Love and Shadows (see below) adds politics to the magic-realist mixture, to devastating effect. Paula is a moving account of the death of Allende’s daughter which opens out into the story of her own life and the political tragedies of Chile. Aphrodite is an unclassifiable celebration of food, sex and sensuality which reflects the same delight in the physical world that runs through all her fiction.

OF LOVE AND SHADOWS  (1987) Irene Beltrán, a journalist, and her photographer-lover Francisco Leal are investigating the disappearance of a disturbed, possibly saintly adolescent. In the jackbooted dictatorship in which they live, however, the child is not simply missing but ‘disappeared’, one of thousands snatched by the authorities who will never be seen again. Allende surrounds her main characters with a web of fantastic personal history in true magic-realist style. But the further the investigators thread their way through the sadism and ruthlessness of the labyrinthine fascist state, the more fact begins to swallow fairytale. The investigators themselves begin to lose reality – their love affair becomes a swooning parody of romantic fiction – but what they discover grows more and more uncomfortably like real South American life, like nightmare fleshed.

Allende’s other books include The Stories of Eva Luna (a set of long short stories which forms a pendant to Eva Luna), Daughter of Fortune, Portrait in Sepia (two novels which have the same setting and some of the same characters as The House of the Spirits), City of the Beasts and Zorro, her own take on the legend of the swashbuckling, masked hero.

READ ON

Eva Luna

Alejo Carpentier, The Chase Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist Richard Condon, Winter Kills Stephen Dobyns, The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini Carlos Fuentes, A Change of Skin Günter Grass, The Tin Drum Oscar Hijuelos, The Fourteen Sister of Emilio Montez O'Brien Mario Vargas Llosa, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service gives a more farcical view of Allende's terrifying, haunted world