Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
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"Swallowing Stones," by Lisa St. Aubin de Teran; HarperPerennial ($13.95)
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Oswaldo Barreto Miliani is a real-life Venezuelan revolutionary (code name: Otto) with a career behind him as a guerrilla fighter, political prisoner, Robin Hood-style bank robber, adviser to Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende, university professor and, lately, newspaper columnist.
He's also the narrator of a glorious new novel by British author Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, "Swallowing Stones" (published in England simply as "Otto").
Readers familiar with St. Aubin de Teran's hilarious, prizewinning autobiographical novel, "Slow Train to Milan," have met Otto before. He was one of a trio of revolutionaries on the run with whom Lisa took up when she was only 16. The remarkable life she led thereafter has been fodder for much of her fiction and nonfiction. But in "Swallowing Stones" she has delivered her masterwork - 70-year-old Otto's story in his own words, so persuasively captured on the page that it's difficult to keep in mind that he didn't write this.
Otto's voice is irresistible, whether he's disclosing the downside of dealing with a garrulous Castro ("The growing lack of respect for Fidel ... was born not so much from what he said as the time it took him to say it") or evoking the mountainous region where he grew up: "Most people in the Andes didn't realise we spoke Spanish. They called our language `Cristiano': Christian. You could argue until you were blue in the face about it, but Spain, and therefore Spanish, was an alien concept."
His purpose in telling his tale is to dispel some of the many myths that have accrued around him. But his adamant adherence to the facts has all the exotic flair of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel.
"My mother was not a common prostitute," he protests, "and I am not the fruit of a failed back-street abortion. ... It is true that I was born exceptionally hairy, but not that Zara the Madwoman was paid two bolivars to have sex with an orang-utang in San Cristobal de Torondoy and that I am the result of the experiment."
Another myth he's trying to quash: that he was the mastermind behind a string of Venezuelan bank robberies. He only took part in two, he insists, and no one got hurt.
On a deeper level, "Swallowing Stones" examines what drew him into revolutionary politics: "By the age of sixteen ... I began to believe that I would be the Saviour of my People. Don't ask me why."
One explanation may be that he was rebelling against his "vast extended family of extreme right-wingers." The repressive right-wing dictatorship of Col. Marcos Perez Jimenez also triggered Otto's leftist path. Yet he soon started questioning the icons of the left, including Castro, as vigorously as he did those on the right.
Many of the book's chapters read like something out of a political thriller, taking U.S. readers on a through-the-looking-glass tour of Cold War history from a Latin American angle. Otto's impressions of Franco- repressed 1950s Spain, of newly independent Algeria, of early post-revolutionary Cuba and of Paris at the height of student unrest in 1968 are all fresh and penetrating. His account of being in Santiago during the CIA-backed right-wing takeover of Chile on Sept. 11, 1973, is harrowing.
On a more comic note, we're made privy to Otto's ridiculously inept attempts at guerrilla activity in the Venezuelan jungle. It's no surprise when, by the end of the book, Otto washes his hands of it all, deciding "never again to dedicate myself to politics, and in particular to detach myself from the politics of the Left."
St. Aubin de Teran's act of ventriloquism in "Swallowing Stones" - the way she brings both sharp anecdotes and spontaneous unfoldings of memory to life - could scarcely be bettered. Whatever percentage of her Otto is factual (the book is based on interviews she conducted with him, with which she took "diabolical liberties"), he's now a character for the ages. And the "novel" they've conjured between them is a masterpiece.
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(c) 2006, The Seattle Times. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
