Killing the Mandarin
In this adventurous novel of ideas, Argentina-born Alonso (Althea) explores the question of whether political violence is ever justified, and whether it can achieve its desired ends. In 1969, Jack, teaching American literature on a Fulbright in Montevideo, Uruguay, awaits the arrival of his pen pal, Rebecca Wasser. Twenty years earlier, when he was 14 and Rebecca 12, they spent three days in sexual foreplay on a steamship heading home to the U.S. from China. Now Rebecca, unhappily married to "a twisted, sardonic, mediocre crud," is monitoring a fossil hunt in Argentina. She and Jack embark on a brief affair, but, meanwhile, she falls secretly in love with Jack's graduate student Colin Costello, a leftist of Irish descent who detests the British and rails at U.S. imperialism. Homophobic Colin, who is clandestinely involved with Uruguay's communist Tupamero guerrillas, confides in Jack that he has been sodomized with a nightstick by a Buenos Aires cop who mistook him for a homosexual. Complicating the picture is Lucien Maures, a gay, shaven-headed French anthropologist who seems modeled at least in part on Michel Foucault. Jack, a self-described "humanist liberal" who parries the verbal assaults of foes on both left and right, gives this inventive novel its intellectual center as his creator takes risks?including an ending that embraces ambiguity?that more conventional novelists would never attempt.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.