- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Harper Perennial US; Reprint edition (Oct 31 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 006053463X
- ISBN-13: 978-0060534639
- Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 12.7 x 2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 159 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,118,974 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Fuguet is the central figure of a loose group of young Latin American writers-a movement known as McOndo-who identify themselves in opposition to magical realism. In the author's second pop-culture saturated novel to be published in English (after Bad Vibes), seismologist Beltran Soler tells the story of his childhood via a catalogue of movies that influenced him at pivotal moments. The setup is stiff-the adult Beltran is on his way to a conference in Tokyo when he is inspired to hole up in a hotel room in L.A. and begin writing his film-linked memoirs-but once Fuguet begins piecing together Beltran's lopsided, bicultural life, the novel speeds along, overflowing with ironic insight. Born in 1964, Beltran lives in Encino, Calif., until he is 10, when his family (father, mother and younger sister Manuela) move back to Santiago. Bourgeois in Chile, but barely middle class in the U.S., the family inhabits a weird in-between world. In Encino, Beltran reenacts The Poseidon Adventure with his friends; in Santiago, the family across the street (dubbed the Chilean Waltons by Beltran) wins a family singing contest with its Sound of Music medleys. The ongoing political upheaval in Chile feels like another Technicolor drama, with a few alarming incursions into reality. But the novel's true turmoil is personal: Beltran's difficult adjustment to life in Chile, his adolescence and his family's collapse (his father leaves his mother the night Saturday Night Fever opens). The movie titles heading each chapter serve as subtle triggers for reminiscence, but never become a structural straitjacket, and Fuguet's pop archness is tempered with honest feeling. Despite the rocky start, this is a fresh, notable effort.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Beltran Soler is a seismologist with a fractured family and a shaky sense of self. Born in Chile and brought to L.A. as an infant, he was happily assimilated as a young child. At 10, however, a summer vacation to Chile turned into a permanent stay, and Beltran became an outsider in the land of his birth: culturally displaced, struggling with the language--and just in time for puberty. As the story begins, Beltran is en route to Tokyo for a teaching engagement when he learns from his sister that their grandfather--the inspiration for Beltran's career--has died in an earthquake. Extending his layover in L.A., Beltran holes up in a hotel room, obsessively creating lists of movies, which he e-mails to a friendly Californian he met on the plane. Revisiting his childhood by remembering the movies, he makes some sense of a life that was, in the first place, partly lived through movies. Fuguet, an antimagic realist, creates a thoroughly contemporary coming-of-age tale steeped in sly social analysis, salted with pathos, and leavened with humor. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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First Sentence
Hello?"" ""Hi, Beltran." Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Hello?"" ""Hi, Beltran." Read the first page
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Coming of Age in Chile,
By
This review is from: The Movies of My Life (Hardcover)
Fuget's second novel to appear in translation (following Bad Vibes), features a gimmicky framework that actually works well and transcends merely being cute. A somewhat clunky first section introduces the reader to Beltran, a Chilean seismologist traveling from Santiago to Japan, via LA, for a conference. A conversation with a woman on the plane, a snippet of a radio interview heard in a taxi, and the news that his grandfather has died are the catalysts for his holing up in an LA hotel and feverishly writing a memoir of sorts (which forms the bulk of the book). While it is a traditional memoir in that it proceeds chronologicallyófrom Beltran's birth in 1964 and his life in Los Angeles (Inglewood and later Encino) until 1974, when vacation in post-Allende Chile turns into a permanent stayóhis recollections are arranged in a series of fifty brief sections, each corresponding to a movie.In each case, the movie serves as a launching point for exploring an event from his past and reconsidering it. What rapidly emerges is a picture of a man scarred by both the dysfunction and displacement of his upbringing. While in the LA, his life is relatively normal, and he grows up as a regular American boy, although as he looks back at that time, he recognizes the fragility of his parents' marriage and his father's distinct discomfort at being a father. However, the real damage comes at age 10, when this fully functional pop-culture saturated American boy moves back to Chile, where has a difficult time adjusting to the different language, social rules, and culture. Ultimately, this is a bittersweet and poignant coming-of-age story, as Beltran's friendless adolescence morphs into semi-acceptance as a teenager, and of course, his sexual awakening. What is clear early on is the connection between his uncertain and capricious childhood and his adult fascination with earthquakes (events that shatter any illusion of stability, get it?). This is a bit of a heavy-handed maneuver, although the presence of a seismologist grandfather makes it all coalesce more than it might have. Throughout, moderately interesting issues of class and culture are raised, amidst this backdrop of films and growing pains. Fuget is the foremost of a loose band of younger Latin American writers who have rejected magical realism, and are attempting to forge a more real, modernist approach to literature. If this book is anything to judge by, it's a welcome change of pace.
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Feel of Two Societies,
By
This review is from: The Movies of My Life (Hardcover)
Fuguet has uniquely captured the feeling of the bicultural individual in this haunting book. His description of Chile in the last part of the Allende regieme is right on. I was living in Santiago in those days and the book brought back powerful memories. However, the reader does not have to know anything about Chile to find this book appealing. Be warned, the book has a highly ironic bent and repays a careful reading with lots of insights.If you have found other Latin authors a bit hard to access, you should definitely give this book a try. It is a unique and insightful description of a young man's evolution straddling two societies.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Unreadable.,
By
This review is from: The Movies of My Life (Hardcover)
Alberto Fuguet, The Movies of My Life (Harper, 2003)A trick does not a book make, no matter how interesting it is. And the trick ehre is interesting; Fuguet takes the structure of a noted director (can't remember who, because my brain is swiss cheese; Elia Kazan?)'s autobiography and turns it into the story of a family trying to make it. The beginning works very well, being a series of emails between the narrator and someone he met on a plane about why he's decided to simply abandon his career and sit in a Los Angeles hotel room writing this, and the structure is intriguing, but beauty is only skin-deep. Once you scratch beneath the surface, you find another Oprah's Book Club candidate ripe for the plucking, a dysfunctional family with no qualities to make it stand out from the rest of the dysfunctional family pack so popular in today's publishing world. If you like dysfunctional family novels, this will probably be right up your alley. The rest of you can safely avoid it. (zero)
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