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3.0 

Revolution

By Deb Olin Unferth
Revolution by Deb Olin Unferth digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Rising literary star Deb Olin Unferth offers a new twist on the coming-of-age memoir in this utterly unique and captivating story of the year she ran away from college with her Christian boyfriend and followed him to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas.
Despite their earnest commitment to a myriad of revolutionary causes and to each other, the couple 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. The East-West balance has begun to tip, although the world doesn't know it yet, especially not Unferth and her fiancé (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.

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5 Reviews

3.0
“The whole time I was reading this book, I was wondering if it could possibly be true. Unfirth and her boyfriend tool around Central America getting sick, playing at being revolutionaries, and mostly just going nowhere. I simply can't imagine leaving behind my family, my life, my education, my ambitions, everything to chase some kind of poorly-defined mirage of revolution. The writing style is very stream-of-consciousness. It's pretty and melodious, but conversational. After about a quarter of the way into the book, I started to think that I would have preferred a more plainspoken style of narrative. The story itself was so dreamlike and impossible, add to that the dream-like writing, and I often found myself feeling disoriented and strange. I guess this was kind-of the point, but I found it took away from my enjoyment of the book. Disclosure: I won this book from Goodreads First Reads program.”
“Memoir with an impossible-to-describe but perfectly pitched voice, will remind everybody what it is like to be 18-years-old and lost. Quote: "One morning I looked out the window and a huge tank stood in front of our house. It took up the whole street. So the FMLN ran away and the army moved in. They put a missile launcher in the window and my mother dusted it every day. ‘Mom,’ I said, ‘stop dusting that thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s dusty.’ Still, she dusted. And she tidied. All day she went around the living room, putting the grenades into little rows and folding the soldiers’ clothing. They never lived anywhere so clean."”

About Deb Olin Unferth

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. She teaches at Wesleyan University and currently lives in New York.

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