196 Books: Bolivia

American Visa by Juan de Recacoechea

Bolivia is in South America, here:

And summary, straight from the back of the book:

Armed with fake papers and a handful of gold nuggets, an unemployed schoolteacher sets out from a small town in Bolivia on a desperate quest for an American visa, his best hope for escaping his painful past and reuniting with his grown son in Miami. Mario Alvarez's dream of emigration takes a tragicomic twist on the rough streets of La Paz, Bolivia, as he embarks on a series of Kafkaesque adventures, crossing paths with a colorful cast of hustlers, social outcasts, and crooked politicians--and initiates a romance with a straight-shooting prostitute named Blanca. Spurred on by his detective fantasies and his own tribulations, he hatches a plan to rob a wealthy gold dealer, a decision that draws him into a web of high-society corruption but also brings him closer than ever to obtaining his illusive ticket to paradise. 

So, the summary for this book got me all hyped up but was a little misleading. It might have been my own fault though since I haven't read any Kafka so I wasn't prepared (I started to listen to an audio of The Metamorphosis but I think I only got a third of the way through). Then I saw how a couple of reviewers likened the main character to Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and I was like oh...yeah...that's why this wasn't exactly my favorite. 

I mean, this book was entertaining enough, and a very easy read. And being home with nasty face shingles has given me a good amount of time to sit down, relax, and escape in the book. I think part of the distaste I had is of my own making--I'm a bit of a snob. Maybe more than a bit. But you've got the main character who is basically constantly drunk, who's in his 40s and really has nothing to show for his life, and who creates a lot of his own problems. (Easy for the white, middle class girl to say) Then you've got a ton of prostitutes, vagabonds, beggars, and generally undesirable people. Plus it constantly talked about "half-breeds" which made me feel like it was slightly racist. Maybe that's just how they talk in Bolivia. I dunno. 

*SPOILER*
He never gets his visa. The last sentence of the summary, for some reason, I thought was going to be most of the book. I imagined that he'd get entangled in some shady ass ultra-rich people shit where they'd be like "hey, do this illegal stuff for us and we'll get you to America...also if you don't we'll kill you." Nope. The high-society stuff only came in roughly 200 pages in (give or take) and he really isn't drawn into any sort of web. The author did try to give it a happy ending, it just felt a little lukewarm, probably partly because I didn't love the main character. 

This was a pretty decent book. Apparently it was made into a movie that I don't think I would be very interested in, but cool. Sooo, yeah. Stuff and junk and onto the next.