196 Books: Guatemala

 The Good Cripple by Rodrigo Rey Rosa

This is Guatemala:

This is the summary:

A young man, Juan Luis Luna, is kidnapped in Guatemala City and held at the bottom of a rusty, empty underground fuel tank in an abandoned gas station. The kidnappers demand a ransom; his rich father does not reply. The kidnappers threaten to cut off his son's foot and still hear nothing. They then slice off one of Juan Luis's toes and send it to his father, who still refuses to act. So the next day... The Good Cripple obsessively focused, chilling, allegorical is stunningly explosive. With its enigmatic beginning, however, and its circular relentless structure, the novel is also dense with ideas: can one be whole after mutilation? Can the injured transcend violence? Rodrigo Rey Rosa's style is of a lithe pristine clarity, but beneath that calm surface cruelty, revenge, and diffidence churn darkly away. The Good Cripple is an astonishingly intense book, and as unforgettable as the sight of "the place where the foot had been severed, where a circle of red flesh, now a little black along the edges, could be seen, with a concentric circle of white bone that was both milky and glassy..."

Well that was fast. 

For Guatemala, I was torn between this and another book. I asked a few friends if they wanted to help me pick my book for Guatemala. They were not helpful. (My bffffffff later asked if I was back from Guatemala and I was like, umm don't you think it would be a bit weird for me to go Surprise, I'm immediately going to Guatemala!) So I asked my mom. She told me to pick the other one because this sounded depressing and awful. I ended up picking this because I thought it sounded thought-provoking. 

Once again, you just can't completely trust the summary. I've said before that I'm not the best one at reading into the text, but I did not get those deep questions in there. I mean, yes, there were mentions of the prosthetic foot bothering him and of the limp, but no emotional or mental questioning. Don't get me wrong, I did like the book, and it was one I was excited to get into each day. Ok wait, now thinking back on it, maybe it did get into that stuff later on. SPOILER. Luna eventually finds one of the guys who kidnapped him and goes to talk to him. Just to talk, just to find out more about what happened and why they did it. And then he just walks away. It talks about a couple of times that Luna wants to hurt the guy, but he doesn't. Although he does say, and this is a great insult, "Thank you for being so sincere, you son of a thousand bitches."

But, of course, there were a couple of bits that bothered me. 

"She began to weep, but she felt neither pain nor rage, only a disturbance caused by the father's lack of compassion and natural coldness, the son's helplessness, and her own womanly powerlessness." ..."womanly" powerlessness? Come on. Would anyone say "manly" powerlessness? No. So can we stop with that crap, please? Powerlessness would have worked just fine. Also, I felt a little bit bad for the father. I mean it's real fucked up that he ignored these people who kidnapped his son until they cut off his foot. But the coldness and lack of compassion seemed to just be depression and apathy. Like have you ever been so depressed that you just actually can't care about anything? That you can't dredge up any kind of feeling? It's worse than when you feel shitty, because if you just don't care about things, what do you have to live for? And then of course the dad knows he's fucked up, but he can't really do anything other than pay the ransom at that point. 

"Don't forget he's half Jewish," the Horrible insisted. "He'll fuck us over if he can." The more I read these stories the worse I feel for Jewish people. Can we all just leave them alone? Can we stop with all the stupid stereotypes, across the board? Can we all just be nice already?!