New Book About Colombia! MY COLOMBIAN WAR by Silvana Paternostro

juancegomez says on Nov 24, 2007, 17:04:

Only read a couple of (U.S.) reviews about it earlier in the month, but I was unimpressed with what they pointed out (some of her quotes seem a bit...maybe either too grandiose or too aloof, for lack of better terms. Doesn't seem too objective).

Seems you saw something else in it, which is entirely valid. I may or may not pick it up at some point, but am not in a hurry. Others might welcome your recommendation more readily, I suppose.

Here's one of the reviews I had read:

-------
Writer returns to Colombia, where drug war is everywhere, nowhere
Kate Foster

Sunday, November 11, 2007

My Colombian War

A Journey Through the Country I Left Behind
By Silvana Paternostro

HENRY HOLT; 325 PAGES; $26

In 2000, the United States put in place Plan Colombia, its third largest military aid package after those given to Israel and Egypt. Colombia at that time had the highest rates worldwide for kidnapping, murder and other crimes. Left-wing rebels and right-wing paramilitary organizations were equally brutal, killing civilians with chain saws and arranging body parts in grotesque bouquets for surviving family members. Drugs and politics but mainly social inequalities were behind the violence. Today, human rights violations are still rampant, but the bloodshed has lessened significantly since the 2002 election of a hard-liner president.

"The only reality Colombia has known since its inception is war," Silvana Paternostro writes in her new book, "My Colombian War," an ultimately frustrating mix of memoir and reportage. Paternostro sees no peace in sight and believes that Colombians have their heads in the sand. Between 1999 and 2003, the Colombian-born journalist set out to "read Colombians the Riot Act," to tell them that they all have "blood on their hands." And to find out how, or if, she now fits into the country of her birth.

A self-professed gringa, living "the liberal elite New York American life," Paternostro returned to her hometown, the coastal city of Barranquilla, in 2002, ostensibly to write a magazine story about her family's farm, which is in dangerous rebel and paramilitary territory. But mainly she is there because she is "haunted by Colombia." Twenty-five years before her story opens, Paternostro left Colombia for college in Michigan, where she hung a poster of Che Guevara on her dorm wall, dreaming of joining the revolution. Until then, she had spent a privileged childhood attending an American school in Barranquilla, hanging out at El Country Club, oblivious to living under a curfew. She even professes never to have noticed that her town had a river, the Magdalena, which flows over 930 miles of her country.

This out-of-focus Colombia still suits her. When she returns, Paternostro confesses her "secret for tolerating" Colombian life: "I go around without my contact lenses." Though the book contains solid reporting, comments such as these may make readers nervous. Paternostro doesn't vote in Colombian elections ("It is how I manifest feeling abandoned"), and on the book's final page deems her country "a failed state that scares me to the point of blindness." Readers may sympathize with her but will miss the open-eyed reporting style Paternostro has demonstrated in the past writing about places a bit farther from home, such as Cuba.

"My Colombian War" opens with Paternostro's declaration she will return to her homeland to speak to the rebels and the paras and learn what's really going on. But this is a tease. As a light-skinned Colombian with a last name carrying high social status, she would have been bait - like the French poodles trotting around Barranquilla on golden leashes - for the rebels. Apart from a brief, dangerous trip to her family's farm, she spends most of her time in her grandmother's apartment in Barranquilla and at home with her parents in Bogotá. Even within this limited sphere, however, interesting characters do surface, including her uncle, the overseer of the family farm who struggles to modernize and put the past behind him, and Billy, a young U.S. Marine who confides in Paternostro about busting Colombian drug operations for the U.S. Embassy.

Despite the challenges of seeing what's closest to her, Paternostro turns the process of her war with Colombia inside out. She reveals how returning to her homeland affects her and describes her journalistic musings and anxieties in detail, elucidating her anger with her compatriots. Colombians, she believes, are obsessed with Carnival and beauty queens ("The amount of cleavage in Colombia's journalism makes me want to scream," she writes), not the war they face daily.

But her family takes in several televised news reports on decidedly less-than-voluptuous subjects. Is her family an exception? When her grandmother's chauffeur decides to hang out in the shade with his friends instead of joining her inside Barranquilla's Romantic Museum, she wonders if his lack of interest is "related to why there is chaos" in Colombia. She never considers that an ordinary fruit vendor, lottery-ticket seller and the driver may have something to discuss in the shade other than the latest cleavage.

Paternostro is acutely aware of the awkwardness of her "mission to bring war upon Colombians." War, she sometimes sees clearly, is already upon Colombia. "I wish I could be less uptight, less critical," she writes. Working to ease the paralyzing fears of Colombia's media, to make its people safer in their beds, to increase reading rates - these goals seem to be what Paternostro strives for. But guilt over leaving, childhood terrors and the usual baggage associated with home and family blur the purpose of her personal war. When Paternostro describes a Colombian publishing a subversive magazine, who is, in his way, "fighting for Colombia," it comes as a relief to meet finally someone offering hope.

Kate Foster has reported for Time and CondeNast Portfolio. She is the North American correspondent for the German magazine Air and a book reviewer for Publishers Weekly.

This article appeared on page M - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/11/RVQ5RP0JC....

b bruce says on Nov 25, 2007, 15:45:

Right on, juancegomez. I have been starved for books about modern day Colombia. I found several in one of the book stores in Bogota's airport. But stateside, even in the libraries it is hard to find books about Colombia. It is almost as the place does not exist! Thank you for the added info!

b bruce says on Nov 25, 2007, 15:45:

Right on, juancegomez. I have been starved for books about modern day Colombia. I found several in one of the book stores in Bogota's airport. But stateside, even in the libraries it is hard to find books about Colombia. It is almost as the place does not exist! Thank you for the added info!