Book No. 2 of my Bucket List 2013 challenge
Do you know where Kamchatka is?
Rivers, bears, volcanos: just some of the things amazing Kamchatka has to offer. Photograph: Alamy
It’s one of the places in the world that I would LOVE to visit but probably never will. Years ago, one summer, I watched Fiddler on the Roof repeatedly because I was living in Romania and it was the only adult video that was in the house! Tevye’s daughter Hodel marries Perchik, a student revolutionary who’s arrested and exiled to Kamchatka, and I found Tevye’s farewell to her, as she caught the train east, heartbreaking. Later I saw a TV programme about the region and ever since I have longed to go. It is a remote, volcanic, wildlife rich, extreme but beautiful peninsula in Far East Russia, jutting out into the cold northern Pacific ocean. It’s why I chose to read this book.
It is also the name of one of the regions in the game, Risk; or, in the context of this book, it represents to ‘Harry’, the protagonist, the place that, ‘whenever the game turned ugly, I have holed up in and survived…..Because Kamchatka was the place from where you fought back’.
Set in and around Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1976, it takes place at the beginning of the rule of the military junta. Seen through the eyes of a 10-year-old boy it is an account of the life of the ‘Vicente’ family, who have fringe involvement and connections with the left leaning fraternity, who were being rounded up and ‘disappeared’. They leave the city and take up residence in a borrowed quinta or bungalow just outside, going partially underground.
The family all change identities and our young narrator choses Harry due to his obsession with Houdini. He is at first outraged with the enforced exile. Isolated from friends, toys and all that is familiar, his 5-year-old brother ‘the Midget’, and he struggle to readjust. They are further outraged by having to convert to Catholicism to attend a new school although this leads to a little more normality in their lives.
Translated from the original Spanish by Frank Wynne
However, the fear and the sense of impending doom are never far away even in the funny moments such as when his mother, a hopeless cook and housekeeper with dodgy taste in movies, reaches a new low in culinary offerings. Most often the threat is evoked by metaphor, such as the Midgets’ repeated bedwetting or the boys’ daily battle to rescue suicidal toads who’ve jumped into the swimming pool by placing a plank for them to find and so climb out. It has a claustrophobic feel throughout.
The advent of a teenage activist, Lucas, who befriends Harry, helps to make life more bearable and presciently Lucas teaches him physical survival skills, again a metaphor for the life he will be asked to live in the future. He also helps Harry to develop his escapologist skills, another metaphor for the predicament they both find themselves in.
Harry and his father have always played the Argentinian version of Risk and after replacing the copy left in their home in the city they continue to do so, building a sense of tension. As they battle it out on the board we know that the family are losing their battle against time. One of my favourite chapters is the one in which they visit their grandparents hacienda, enjoying intimate, inter-generational family time and spend a night under the stars. But you know instinctively that it simply the lull before the storm, one last precious moment.
The book has an interesting structure set around a school day, each part a school subject. It is full of cultural metaphors in the shape of magazines, TV programmes, films and music. Although the main narrator is the young Harry, there are several chapters told by the adult one too. These are brilliant, if whimsical, detours on subjects such as biology, geography and the nature of time as ways of seeing the world in reality, but I felt that these detracted from story overall.
It is a warm, often funny, book about a subject that could be so bleak and dark (and no doubt was) and yet we know it will indeed have a tragic ending because the author tells the ending in the first two pages! The book in effect goes full circle. ‘Kamchatka’ is the last word Harry’s father whispers in his ear before he is separated from his parents forever.
I’ll admit I cried – but I’m a mother, and what mother wouldn’t – given the circumstances?
To be honest I did find a lot of the book irritating mainly due to the constant metaphor and annoying literary references, which if you knew the subject matter was fine but if not……… I felt the author was showing off at times.
I also felt that there was a lack of depth too, in plotting and characterization. It felt almost cinematic which given the author’s day job is perhaps not unsurprising.
I do recommend it but with reservations.
But it was a thoughtful book, lacking bitterness over the politically history that under pins but never invades the story. This is probably due to the successful employment of the child’s voice – which is very convincing.
Try it – you may well love it.
Argentinian screenwriter and author, Marcello Figueras
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