Venezuela

Barrio Rising

Blending rich narrative accounts with incisive analyses of urban space, politics, and everyday life, Barrio Rising offers a sweeping reinterpretation of modern Venezuelan history as seen not by its leaders but by residents of one of the country’s most distinctive popular neighborhoods.

Beginning in the late 1950s political leaders in Venezuela built what they celebrated as Latin America’s most stable democracy. But outside the staid halls of power, in the gritty barrios of a rapidly urbanizing country, another politics was rising—unruly, contentious, and clamoring for inclusion.

In the mid-1950s, a military government bent on modernizing Venezuela razed dozens of slums in the heart of the capital Caracas, replacing them with massive buildings to house the city’s working poor. The project remained unfinished when the dictatorship fell on January 23, 1958, and in a matter of days city residents illegally occupied thousands of apartments, squatted on green spaces, and renamed the neighborhood to honor the emerging democracy: el veintitrés (the 23rd).

During the next 30 years, through eviction efforts, guerrilla conflict, state violence, internal strife, and official neglect, inhabitants of el veintitrés learned to use their strategic location and symbolic tie to the promise of democracy in order to demand a better life. Granting legitimacy to the state through the vote but protesting its failings with violent street actions when necessary, they laid the foundation for an expansive understanding of democracy—both radical and electoral—whose features still resonate today.

“Barrio Rising should appeal to both the general public and specialists, possessing the rare quality of being highly accessible and scholarly in equal measure. This is an exemplary effort of combining archival and ethnographic research to demystify one of Venezuela’s most politically charged neighborhoods, and in doing so, provides crucial insights into the country’s often volatile and complex political history.” —Latin Americanist

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

Blue Label

Winner of the Arturo Uslar Pietri award for Latin American literature & shortlisted for the Critics Award of Venezuela

Eugenia Blanc, a young Caraqueñan and quintessential teenager at war with the world around her, has one aim: after graduating from high school, to abandon Venezuela definitively. She embarks on a spontaneous road trip in a banged-up Fiat with her rebellious classmate Luis Tévez, in search of her grandfather, the one person who can provide her with the documents that would allow her to leave the country. While Eugenia and Luis’s tentative, troubled romance unfolds during the Chávez era, the story also looks back at Venezuela’s “lost decade” of the 1990s, a time of intractable violence, inequality, corruption, and instability that led to Chávez’s election.

With an unvarnished fluidity that brings to mind Jack Kerouac and a crazy-ass playlist that ranges from REM to Bob Dylan to El Canto del Loco to Shakira, Blue Label is an audacious, dark novel with a gut-punch of an ending; the prize-winning book by a writer who has cemented his reputation as a major Latin American voice.

“Blue Label is a wickedly well-written novel, with electric prose that delivers one jolt after another, a subtle and joyful sense of humor, an intoxicating infectiousness, a complex character about whom we want to know everything, and an ending that leaves the reader with a feeling of sweet melancholy. It’s a book we’ll be talking about for years to come.” ―Daniel Saldaña París

“One part Scheherazade, two parts Boccaccio, a twist of Bolaño, and a dash of bitters. Blue Label is intoxicating, hilarious, and the best novel on the calamity that is today's Venezuela.” —Carmen Boullosa

(Group read suggestion from Beth McCrea, book club co-founder.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

Colaterales/Collateral

A winner of the prestigious poetry award named for the Nobel laureate Octavio Paz—in a special bilingual edition featuring English and Spanish translations.

These poems were written during days spent clearing river debris while living along the Hudson River in Manhattan after moving from Venezuela. However, the global perspective is clearly shown with poems that speak of the wanderings of a nomadic subject who erases and rewrites in an imaginary landscape.

The Paz Prize for Poetry is presented by the National Poetry Series and The Center at Miami Dade College. This annual award—named in the spirit of the late Nobel Prize–winning poet, Octavio Paz—honors a previously unpublished book of poetry written originally in Spanish by an American resident.

“Di Donato's poetry exhibits a tremendous control of language...She is both ancient and contemporary. . . a vital poet who honors the memory of Octavio Paz.” —Victor Hernández Cruz

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

Doña Barbara

Rómulo Gallegos is best known for being Venezuela’s first democratically elected president. But in his native land, he is equally famous as a writer responsible for one of Venezuela’s literary treasures, the novel Doña Barbara. Published in 1929 and all but forgotten by Anglophone readers, Doña Barbara is one of the first examples of magical realism, laying the groundwork for later authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Following the epic struggle between two cousins for an estate in Venezuela, Doña Barbara is an examination of the conflict between town and country, violence and intellect, male and female. Doña Barbara is a beautiful and mysterious woman—rumored to be a witch—with a ferocious power over men. When her cousin Santos Luzardo returns to the plains in order to reclaim his land and cattle, he reluctantly faces off against Doña Barbara, and their battle becomes simultaneously one of violence and seduction. All of the action is set against the stunning backdrop of the Venezuelan prairie, described in loving detail. Gallegos’s plains are filled with dangerous ranchers, intrepid cowboys, and damsels in distress, all broadly and vividly drawn. A masterful novel with an important role in the inception of magical realism, Doña Barbara is a suspenseful tale that blends adventure, fantasy, and romance.

Hailed as “the Bovary of the llano” and “possibly the most widely known Latin American novel,” Doña Barbara features a magnetic and memorable heroine, who has inspired numerous adaptations on the big and small screens.

“Remarkable. . . . From its first pages it reveals . . . why it made Gallegos famous. . . . If Señor Gallegos is one-half as good a President as he is a novelist, Venezuela is a lucky land.” ―New York Times

“An exciting heroic tale of the life of Venezuelan plainsmen, master and peons, ranchers and cowboys and horse thieves.” ―New Republic

(A special thank you to book club member, Jordi Valbuena for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

It Would be Night in Caracas

In Caracas, Venezuela, Adelaida Falcón stands over an open grave. Alone, she buries her mother—the only family she has ever known—and worries that when night falls thieves will rob the grave. Even the dead cannot find peace here.

Adelaida had a stable childhood in a prosperous Venezuela that accepted immigrants in search of a better life, where she lived with her single-mother in a humble apartment. But now? Every day she lines up for bread that will inevitably be sold out by the time she reaches the registers. Every night she tapes her windows to shut out the tear gas raining down on protesters. When looters masquerading as revolutionaries take over her apartment, Adelaida must make a series of gruesome choices in order to survive in a country disintegrating into anarchy, where citizens are increasingly pitted against each other. But just how far is she willing to go?

A bold new voice from Latin America, Karina Sainz Borgo’s touching, thrilling debut is an ode to the Venezuelan people and a chilling reminder of how quickly the world we know can crumble.

“Dry, concise, direct, with an extraordinary stirring force… Sainz Borgo’s novel is simply masterful.” —Fernando Aramburu

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book

The Last Days of El Commandante

President Hugo Chávez’s cancer looms large over Venezuela in 2012, casting a shadow of uncertainty and creating an atmosphere of secrets, lies, and upheaval across the country. This literary thriller follows the connected lives of several Caracas neighbors consumed by the turmoil surrounding the Venezuelan president’s impending death.

Retired oncologist Miguel Sanabria, seeing the increasingly combustible world around him, feels on constant edge. He finds himself at odds with his wife, an extreme anti-Chavista, and his radical Chavista brother. These feelings grow when his nephew asks him to undertake the perilous task of hiding cell-phone footage of Chávez in Cuba. Fredy Lecuna, an unemployed journalist, takes a job writing a book about Chávez’s condition, which requires him to leave for Cuba while his landlord attempts to kick his wife and son out of their apartment. Nine-year-old María, long confined to an apartment with a neurotic mother intensely fearful of the city’s violence, finds her only contact with the outside world through a boy she messages online.

“The stories Barrera Tyszka presents [in The Last Days of El Comandante] offer a solid slice of the uncertainty of Venezuelan life of the time…Barrera Tyszka is particularly good on the everyday—and also on the odd Cuban connection and the complex interplay between Cuban (national and personal) interests and Venezuelan ones at the time.” —The Complete Review

(A special thank you to book club member, Elke Richelsen for the suggestion.)

View on Amazon | Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book