Blue Label
Описание книги
“One part Scheherazade, two parts Boccaccio, a twist of Bolaño, and a dash of bitters. Blue Label is intoxicating, hilarious, and the best novel on the calamity that is today’s Venezuela.”—Carmen Boullosa "This deftly and idiomatically translated novel . . . a quest of sorts, as a high school student in Chávez's Venezuela tries to make sense of love and life . . . packs a punch on many levels: personal, political, and even mythic." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Eugenia Blanc, a young Caraqueñan and quintessential teenager at war with the world around her, has one aim: after graduating from high school, to abandon Venezuela definitively. She embarks on a spontaneous road trip in a banged-up Fiat with her rebellious classmate Luis Tévez, in search of her grandfather, the one person who can provide her with the documents that would allow her to leave the country. While Eugenia and Luis’s tentative, troubled romance unfolds during the Chávez era, the story also looks back at Venezuela’s “lost decade” of the 1990s, a time of intractable violence, inequality, corruption, and instability that led to Chávez’s election. With an unvarnished fluidity that brings to mind Jack Kerouac and a crazy-ass playlist that ranges from REM to Bob Dylan to El Canto del Loco to Shakira, Blue Label is an audacious, dark novel with a gut-punch of an ending; the prize-winning first book by a writer who has cemented his reputation as a major young Latin American voice.
Отрывок из книги
To Luis Tévez and Cristina Bárcenas
(ENGLISH, PSYCHOLOGY, EARTH SCIENCES NOTEBOOKS, ETC.)
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Once again we were conned: the preparatory course was a sham. The teacher, Susana, blinded us with false advertising. She coordinated a training course that was held on weekends. The classes would supposedly be delivered by a group of trained education specialists. Those “qualified experts” ended up being Susana’s younger brother, a student of mathematics at the Institute of Industrial Technology, and a cousin from Barquisimeto, who was studying the second semester of literature at Libertador Experimental Pedagogical University. Eugenia, who fretted over my future, forced me to enroll. Natalia, Jorge, and the others did the course out of boredom. Every Saturday morning Susana handed us a stack of photocopies: exercises taken from the internet, lists of synonyms, difficult equations, etcetera. Susana’s brother, whose name I’ve forgotten, was a real character. The class put him on edge. Natalia, in particular, unnerved him. She liked to wear short skirts and make him feel uncomfortable with suggestive movements. Those were the most useless mornings of my life. Luckily, I had my iPod. Luis Tévez enrolled at the end of January. An interesting shake-up in routine occurred then.
Luis Tévez’s arrival at the preparatory course was an event. He made an unforgettable impression when he showed up on a motorbike one morning. The usual adoring crowd surrounded the hero’s wheels and uttered expressions of awe and amazement. Luis removed a bright-colored helmet. Jorge joined the welcoming committee. Everyone adored Luis. Even those who said they despised him were captivated by his involuntary charm. “What’s up, dude!” called out a voice I didn’t recognize. Natalia grabbed my shoulder: it was the manager of Kamasutra. They slapped each other’s backs. A bunch of idiots surrounded them, looking on at them as if they were gods from some far-off galaxy. Luis’s friend was called Mel Camacho.
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