Book Report: Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

16. Ben Fountain, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (2006) (3/20/21)

These eight beautifully written and told stories set variously in Haiti, Colombia, Sierra Leone, Myanmar, North Carolina, and fin-de-siècle Austria manage to capture emotions and, maybe especially, yearnings that are heart-breakingly believable.

I had read the first five stories many years ago, and although I didn't remember the details, once I got going again in each story, each situation, I found myself in a familiar place, with familiar people—for they do stick with you. (Unlike, say, mysteries, where so often I start rereading and it's as if I've never cracked the book open before.)

Fountain has spent a lot of time in Haiti, for research on a novel that never sold. The other places he visited in his imagination and through reading. But you'd never know it, because they all feel very authentic. Or perhaps it's because the people feel so authentic. I especially enjoyed the stories with a lot of dialogue, delineating colorful characters, usually at cross-purposes.

"Near Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera," which was sparked by a news report that the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange had invited some Colombian guerrillas for a tour of the floor, involves an ornithologist who is captured by rebels. I wrote a bit about "Rêve Haitien" here. "The Good Ones Are Already Taken" concerns the young wife of a Special Forces soldier who returns from Haiti married to a Voodoo goddess. "Asian Tiger" is about a second-tier golf champion who finds himself sucked into corrupt politics and business in Myanmar. "Bouki and the Cocaine," again in Haiti, tells the story of two brothers who stumble on large duffel bags full of cocaine. "The Lion's Mouth" concerns a worn-down aid worker in Sierra Leone confronted with an opportunity—though it involves blood diamonds. "Brief Encounters with Che Guevara" is just that. And "Fantasy for Eleven Fingers" tells the story of one, then sixty years later another piano prodigy, each with an extra ring finger on their right hand.

The story lines are lively in their difference and the imagination invoked, which I greatly enjoyed. 

Here is an excerpt from "Bouki and the Cocaine," involving the brothers Lulu and Syto and their nephew, a wheeler-and-dealer from the capital:

     "How much is it worth?" Lulu asked. His eyes shone like lacquer in the candlelight.
     "The going rate's four thousand," Nixon told him. "Four thousand dollars U.S."
     "For one sack?" Lulu cried, delighted, but Nixon frowned and glanced at his friends. Then he turned back to his uncles and spoke very slowly.
     "That's four thousand," he touched the kilo bag on the table, "for one of these."
     When Syto heard that, he assumed he was going to die. There was too much money involved, too many desperate people, but the next moment he was thinking: is this what a black man has to do to get a little respect? Risk your life, as Lulu had done when he denounced the government thieves? As Nixon had done running his contraband gasoline? . . . [Y]ou were either a chump or a thief, those were your choices in this world. Syto despaired, knowing he'd never be able to explain his sense that they were all, however improbably, on the same side.