The Death of Che Guevara (review)

192 the minnesota review Jay Cantor. 77ie Death of Che Guevara. New York: Knopf, 1983. 578 pp. $17.95 (doth). In The Death of Che Guevara, his first novel, Jay Cantor presents an intricately constructed and drastically revised account of Che's political education and experience. The action opens in 1965, with Cantor's Che, no longer in charge of the Cuban economy, enduring a kind of internal exile and using his time to reflect in writing on his childhood and youthful wanderings. Roughly the first half of the novel consists of documents—journal entries, notes, brief essays —produced by Che in the course of this exerdse in recollection. Then there's a break, the time shifts to 1968, and we find Ponco, a survivor of the Bolivian campaign, sifting through another set of documents —campaign diaries, newpaper reports, speeches -in an effort to make sense of Che's last, disastrous adventure. But for all its pseudo-documentary apparatus, The Death of Che Guevara is by no means an exerdse in conventional literary biography. Cantor's Che "rewrites" his life, makes his brothers and sisters disappear, his father die of cancer, to gd at the "intuitively right" (p. 229). And Ponco , taking his cue from Che, offers an even more audacious revision of history. The least successful section of the novel is the first. The actual Che, born in politically turbulent Argentina in 1928, was the son of passionately intellectual, sodaUy established, but economically unlucky parents. His childhood was haunted by his family's decline and by asthma, redeemed by his athletic achievements and precodous wanderings. This is the stuff that good fiction is made of, but the childhood recollections produced by Cantor's Che are not good fiction. They read like the unpolished exerrises in self-exploration they are supposed to be, but for this very reason they do not provide the satisfactions of fiction. Characters and events, recalled but rarely rendered with any vividness, remain beyond our ken and caring. And Che's efforts at sdf-analysis produce only a series^of predicatole pseudo-illuminations, what Che, speaking of someone else's work, caUs "stupid amateur psychoanalysis" (p. 95). Fortunatdy, Che's writing improves as he takes up the tale of his youthful wanderings across Latin America. One still wishes that Cantor had made his narrator a more conscientious artist, less given to rambling accounts of his ramblings. But as Che recalls his initiation to revolutionary struggles in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Cuba, some of the passionate intensity of these struggles works its way into his writing. The last half of 77ie Death of Che Guevara is stronger: scenes are more fuUy realized; characters' struggles for comprehension produce unexpected, troubling interpretations. At first we are on familiar ground. Sticking dose to the facts as we know them and borrowing whole passages from adual campaign diaries, Cantor's Ponco chronicles the establishment of the guerrilla base on the Nancahuazu, its premature discovery by the Bolivian army, and the confusions, errors, and frictions that seem to have characterized Che's operation from the start. And he advances a familiar explanation for the faUure of Che's appeal to the Bolivian peasants: small landowners and voters since the revolution of 1952, they were simply unpersuaded of the need for revolution. But gradually Ponco's documents begin to tell another story. The pragmatic "peasants" become visionary, coca-chewing "Indians" still caught up in a project inherited from the Incas . And Che's dream of progressive radicalization through an interaction between peasants and guerrillas becomes a nightmare. Instead of drawing the people out of thdr pre-Columbian darkness into the light of socialist humanism, Che, like a latter-day, left wing Kurtz, finds himself bdng drawn back into the pre-humanist vision and parabolic style of "the Inca." "Our mistake," he deddes, Aas been to offer them new words, what is calledprogress, the ability to enter history, the very acid they have bent their will to neutralizing. Instead: a rebellion against history. Against imperialism. One that will end history, though notfora long-promised rest oreven "prosperity"butforsuffering. Not an imediate or even progressive end to sufering, but the re-establishment ofa meaningfor...