![]() ""Sucking Chest Wounds"" evokes a vivid impressionistic account of a day in the life of a journalist, and ""The Secret Admirers"" effectively uses Hemingway banter to tell the story of a near-encounter with Graham Greene. Elman has a good journalist's eye for quick characterizing detail. The journalism is most prevalent: ""When They Killed Macho Negro,"" for instance, is a precise description of post-Somozan nerves among young soldiers. ![]() Roughly, the book divides into three types of tellings: journalism told in the guise of fiction character sketches and fully-formed fictions. ![]() Prudhomme, his sidekick, is a convenient foil and sounding-board who allows the narrator to make sense, or to try to make sense, of the events he witnesses. ""Richard,"" the narrator of many of these sketches, is a composite of the author, of his friends, and of stories told to him. In those terms, it's a successful collection. The book is a fictional companion to an earlier collection of essays, Cocktails at Somoza's (1081), but it reads more like embellished journalism. Veteran Elman (The Breadfruit Lotteries, Taxi Driver) he re compiles some 30-odd fictions written about Nicaragua between 1978-the year of his first visit there-and 1987. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |