Word: velascos
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Three stories dovetail in this small book. One of them involves the ordeal of Luis Alejandro Velasco, a sailor on a Colombian destroyer. He was swept overboard and into the Caribbean, along with seven other crew members, on Feb. 28, 1955, and endured ten days in a life raft before swimming ashore to what would become a hero's welcome. Once the cheering had died down, Velasco offered to sell his account to El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota. A young reporter named Gabriel Garcia Marquez spent some 120 hours interviewing the survivor and shaping his recollections into a first...
...successful author's juvenilia. For Garcia Marquez, who would become world famous through his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, this early effort in journalism provided a lesson in the bizarre effects that telling a tale can have on characters and author alike. His attempt to reconstruct Velasco's experiences as factually as possible assumed a life of its own; the sailor who braved exposure and sharks fell afoul of the words of his story. And words, paradoxically, rescued Velasco's adventure from oblivion. When these pieces first appeared in book form, in Spanish in 1970, Garcia Marquez noted...
...intriguing ambience, the central story, recalled by Velasco through the medium of Garcia Marquez, needs no enhancing; the interest commandeered by catastrophes at sea is at least as old as the Odyssey. After eight months of repairs in Mobile, the destroyer Caldas prepares to sail home to Cartagena. The sailors bid farewell to onshore companions. "Our girlfriends wept," Velasco remembers, "and drank whiskey at a dollar and a half a bottle." This attention to specifics serves him well during what is to follow and gets him into trouble later on. For the Caldas does not run into a storm...
...dismayed by the sort of naivete or ideological partisanship which determines "guilt" of an international development adviser by the regime with which he "associates." In my career in the Agency for International Development (AID), I have worked with such motley regimes as those of Torrijos in Panama, Velasco in Peru, Banzer in Bolivia, Burnham in Guyana and Somoza in Nicaragua. Like most Third World countries, none of them were models of participative democracy. However, they were all serious about development; and in each of them there were people with whom I and our AID mission could work with a clear...
Fuentes, as in his others works, does not develop his characters any better than he explains why they exist or what exactly they are doing. Maldonado is the only three-dimensional protagonist--a confused middle-aged stud who resembles a Velasco painting. Maldonado's triad of women--the seductive Mary, loyal Rebecca and unattainable Sarah--fill the traditional female novelistic roles of whore, mother and virgin. Maldonado's purposeless orders come from two spies, the nationless Timon and the clove-smelling Lebanese Ayub, and a Mexican economics professor Bernstein and the bullying Director General. The only thing which binds...