Revolution The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the Sandinistas

by Unferth, Deb Olin

• ISBN13: 9781250002686
• ISBN10: 1250002680
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-02-14
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Summary

Despite their earnest commitment to a myriad of revolutionary causes and to each other, Deb and her boyfriend find themselves unwanted, unhelpful, and unprepared as they bop around Central America, looking for "revolution jobs." The year is 1987, a turning point in the Cold War, although the world doesn't know it yet, especially not Unferth and her fiance (he proposes on a roadside in El Salvador). The months wear on and cracks begin to form in their relationship: they get fired, they get sick, they run out of money, they grow disillusioned with the revolution and each other. But years later the trip remains fixed in her mind and she finally goes back to Nicaragua to try to make sense of it all. Unferth's heartbreaking and hilarious memoir perfectly captures the youthful search for meaning, and is an absorbing rumination on what happens to a country and its people after the revolution is over.

Author Biography

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the story collection Minor Robberies and the novel Vacation, winner of the 2009 Cabell First Novelist Award and a New York Times Book Review Critics' Choice. Her work has been featured in Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Believer, and the Boston Review. She has received two Pushcart Prizes and a 2009 Creative Capital grant for Innovative Literature and was a Harper's Bazaar Editors' Choice: Name to Know in 2011. She teaches at Wesleyan University and currently lives in New York.

Table of Contents

"This is a very funny, excoriatingly honest story of being young, semi-idealistic, stupid and in love. If you have ever been any of these things, you'll devour it."--Dave Eggers

"Deb Olin Unferth is one of the most ambitious and inspirational writers working today. Her memoir of idealistic, bewildered people-in-training befell me like a fever for which, I'm happy to report, there appears to be no cure. An encounter with Unferth's prose is to be permanently, wondrously afflicted by its genius."--Heidi Julavits, author of The Uses of Enchantment

"Revolution is the best of many worlds: misconceived youth, sharp humor and sharper characters, and mostly, for me, the chance to witness a brand of paragraph-to-paragraph artistry that is much too rare."--John Brandon, author of Citrus County

"Unferth writes with a sly, understated appreciation for the absurd...A dryly humorous memoir of love, travel and wide-eyed idealism."--Kirkus

"This clearheaded and funny memoir captures the grit and chaos of a tumultuous moment in Central American history, but it's really a coming-of-age story...[Unferth] didn't become a revolutionary, but she did become a grown-up."--Mother Jones

"Unferth's prose remains as sure and slicing as a machete, clearing a path through a jungle of emotions...A memoir of unique lucidity, wit, and power."--Booklist

 

Praise for VACATION

"Unferth is always playing a sort of life-or-death word game. She will seize a word and wring all meanings from it, like a terrier worrying a bone… in their very abstraction the descriptions can be truly poignant."--Madison Smartt Bell, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

 

"Unferth disorients and often enchants with her ability to slightly skew the world and render it anew."--Chris Daley, Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review

 

"Unferth's sentences are dazzling…But Vacation's trickiest trick is cartwheeling along the border between the simplicity of allegory and the complexity of true human frailty. Makes you love these characters, too."--Patrick Rapa, Philadelphia City Paper

 

"Fans of Dave Eggers's ever estimable literary concern McSweeney's are finally catching onto what fans of Diane Williams's unsung journal NOON have been savoring for years: the tidy, tuneful uncertainties that weave to form the fictions of Deb Olin Unferth"--The Boston Phoenix