Kamchatka

By Marcelo Figueras

Book Overview

In 1976 Buenos Aires, a ten-year-old boy lives in a world of school lessons and comic books, TV shows and games of Risk--a world in which men have superpowers and boys can conquer the globe on a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802170870
• ISBN13: 9780802170873
• Release Date: May 2011
• Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 1.0" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

Vive La Résistance!

I sincerely do not know whether this review is for everyone. You HAD to have lived certain circumstances and experienced some events in the late seventies in Argentina to enjoy this book. First, I saw the movie "Kamtchatka" (based on this book) in Buenos Aires a few years ago and loved it deeply and painfully. Masterfully, Marcelo Pereyra (the movie director) camouflaged the real meaning of Kamchatka (yes, the remote Russian peninsula) until the very end. As a result, people stayed in the theater just a little bit longer to clear up their throats and dry up those imminent tears. Just a few weeks ago I got this book as a gift, a great one. Naturally, the book expands and intensifies the feelings, the mood and the tempo of the whole story. Harry, his young bother (tenderly yet sarcastically called "El Enano", i.e. the midget) and their parents become a family on the run in the middle of the most atrocious military dictatorship Argentina underwent last century. A shabby summer chateau becomes their safehouse for a while. To fight boredom, Harry (who is also the story narrator) plays with his dad (and loses everytime) a board game popular in Argentina in the 70s: TEG (Wargame Tactics and Strategy). The board had a whimsical world map which included non-existant countries located on real geographic regions, like Kamchatka. Strategy and tumbling dice sealed the outcome of every battle. While the ominous atmosphere created by the ongoing military repression trickles in into Harry's life, the family sticks together. Each member faces this reality in different ways. For instance, father and mother form an indivisible team ready to face death to save their kids. Then the connection between both brothers is one of the highlights of this story, a masterful painting of human relations where family blood runs deeper than anything in the face of hardships. And above everything there is this omnipresent tenderness that the author uses to provide a special glow to this book. You have to find on your own the reason for such a capricious title "Kamchatka" and the title of this review. Then, if you did live under (and survived) a repressive, asphyxiating environment you will feel like crying "Kamchatka!" as in "We shall overcome!"