Title: Forgotten America: The Untold Adventures of Venezuela
Author: Giovanni Calvarese
Publisher: Austin Macauley
ISBN: 1528905164
Pages: 194
Genre: Politics / Fiction / Non-Fiction / Memoir
Reviewed by: David Allen
Hollywood Book Reviews
Imagine a microscope into every headline and news item you read; a microscope that enlivens, vivifies and hurls into your life an undiluted view of the living souls ground daily under the wheel of time – and you have the essence of Forgotten America, Giovanni Calvarese’s word portrait of a country and an epoch in chaos.
In the author’s notes, Calvarese describes himself as being passionate about making a difference in the world. Rest assured, author: you have made a difference. Through anecdote, humor, cautionary tales, with great heaps of local color thrown in – readers are whisked through a half-real, half-fictive dystopia populated by a decimated starving populace, and ruled by a corrupt militaristic regime, allegedly and self-righteously out to halt the demonic incursions of American imperialism and capitalism.
Carlos Christian Santos, the narrator of this feverish magically realistic tale, now a lieutenant of the fascistic Red Scare, actually kidnaps and tortures a childhood sweetheart, all in the name of a just cause. But the book is freighted with delights: the worshipful adoration of his grandma’s baked arepas; the allusions to a glorious past of fecundity, abundance and national pride; the warning cry of a land gone to seed, lost to poverty, despair, and neglect. Calvarese’s cenotaphs on these are elegiac and super lyrical. They might make you cry.
One must step outside the system to know how truly insane the system is. Bear in mind – in this fictional Venezuela, not unlike the Latin America of modern times – people are being disappeared and never spoken of again routinely.
Calvarese writes: “Death or killing was routine like disposing of garbage. It’s a mindless task. It requires no thought or attention. You just follow, discard, dump, bury or burn. This is how it was – routine. It required no awareness. We expected death, mass casualties every time the sun rises until the sun sets. We expected to walk around and trample over the dead as we struggled not to be one of the victims.”
He writes how his beautiful Caracas now stinks. How the sky is blood red and the waters are hopelessly polluted. How will the people live? You read this – you read of this – and the immediate reaction is distancing. As in, “This could never happen here. This stuff only happens in nincompoop third world countries…”
Then you keep reading. You keep thinking. Santos’ page- and two-page long peregrinations, maudlin and precious and stunning, all at once – Could be yours. This is an extremely articulate, compassionate person.
It is through such revelatory writing – part history, part vision, part memoir – that we grasp the human significance of events. Forgotten America: The Untold Adventures of Venezuela, ostensibly one man’s sorry reverie about Venezuela, is actually a swan song for the rest of us. Read it and blink, in a reverie of anticipation.