THE DEATH OF CHE GUEVARA

by Jay Cantor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1983

With a calliope of fashionable fictional techniques, critic Cantor (Literature and Politics) plays out the song of Che Guevara's life and death, making it into a long, drawn-out modernist concert: historical montage; journal entries from Che and his fellow fighters in Cuba and Bolivia; projective scenarios/fantasies (what if Che had chucked it all and gone to Miami to become an ÉmigrÉ M.D.?); actual screenplays; and even some straight descriptive chapters. As the book opens, Che is on the outs with Fidel Castro for criticizing the Soviet trade agreements with mid-Sixties Cuba; exiled to the Isle of Pines, he's commanded to write a work of atoning self-criticism. This accounting, then, becomes a mini-novel of Che's past--from Argentinian birth and horrendously asthmatic childhood to medical school, first revolutionary adventures (Gandhi-style), the killing of his first man in Guatemala, meeting Fidel in 1950s Mexico, and the Fidelista rebel war in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. (These battles are the novel's most vivid and convincing sections.) Then it becomes clear that Fidel, as punishment, will send Che off to Bolivia in 1967 to lead a hopeless, ill-considered, premature guerrilla experiment: the Indians there will treat the wheezing, slight, ascetic man as a god--but he'll be betrayed by the Communist Party of the country, then by some of his own rebel fighters. And, in the insect-thick jungle, he will be taken prisoner. . . and die. Thus, for 574 pages, is Che amplified, a thematic continuum stretched between his lifelong asthma and his open-eyed acceptance of an early death: this synthesizing of historical fact with human frailty is frequently very impressive; the prose is assured, intensely focused. But Cantor floods Che with all the nervous, self-conscious devices of modernist narration, sometimes to ludicrous effect. (Guevara's Bolivian-campaign fighters seem to spend most of their jungle-time in the feverish scratching of voluminous notebook entries.) The novel becomes repetitious early on, with the vertical heaping-up of facts, the literary improvisations on them. And, most crucially, Che himself rarely emerges from all this as an interesting character--so Cantor's elaborate fictional construction, though often rich in political/psychological interplay and imaginative detail (with obvious appeal to a Che-oriented audience), is ultimately a drowned one, overwhelmed by its endless methods.

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1983

ISBN: 0375713832

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION