Rising literary star Deb Olin Unferth offers a new twist on the coming-of-age memoir in this utterly unique and captivating story of the year she ran away from college with her Christian boyfriend and followed him to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas.
Despite their earnest commitment to a myriad of revolutionary causes and to each other, the couple find themselves unwanted, unhelpful, and unprepared as they bop around Central America, looking for "revolution jobs." The year is 1987, a turning point in the Cold War. The East-West balance has begun to tip, although the world doesn't know it yet, especially not Unferth and her fiancé (he proposes on a roadside in El Salvador). The months wear on and cracks begin to form in their relationship: they get fired, they get sick, they run out of money, they grow disillusioned with the revolution and each other. But years later the trip remains fixed in her mind and she finally goes back to Nicaragua to try to make sense of it all. Unferth's heartbreaking and hilarious memoir perfectly captures the youthful search for meaning, and is an absorbing rumination on what happens to a country and its people after the revolution is over.
Sprache
Dateigröße
ISBN-13
978-1-4299-9212-1 (9781429992121)
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the story collection
Minor Robberies and the novel
Vacation, winner of the 2009 Cabell First Novelist Award and a
New York Times Book Review Critics' Choice. Her work has been featured in
Harper's Magazine,
McSweeney's,
The Believer, and the
Boston Review. She has received two Pushcart Prizes and a 2009 Creative Capital grant for Innovative Literature and was a
Harper's Bazaar Editors' Choice: Name to Know in 2011. She teaches at Wesleyan University and currently lives in New York.