Gods Go Begging - Hardcover

Vea, Alfredo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 052594513X ISBN 13: 9780525945130

Publisher: Dutton Adult, 1999

Synopsis

An exploration of the Vietnam War and its aftermath from a Mexican American soldier's perspective follows Jesse Pasadoble as he serves his country overseas, returns to a hostile America, and years later, copes with gang warfare in an American city

About this title

Review:

One could argue that the war novel is an essentially timeless genre. Weapons are subject to long and increasingly lethal refinement--but from Homer's day to our own, the fear, fury, remorse, and anguish experienced on the battlefield have hardly changed a whit. Still, the stories told by Vietnam-generation novelists may differ in the telling. A writer like Alfredo Vea draws on a myriad of cultural and literary traditions to evoke the peculiar terrors of Vietnam--while invariably reflecting the outsider status of the soldiers who fought in the conflict. And for both of these reasons, his third novel, Gods Go Begging, is a remarkable work.

Vea begins his story in present-day San Francisco. The protagonist, Jesse Pasadoble, is a former Army sergeant who's now made a name for himself as a criminal defense attorney. Haunted by wartime memories, Pasadoble has found a way to channel his anguish: his impoverished clients remind him of his suffering comrades, and he seeks a compensatory justice for what he and his platoon lost.

Jesse hated death. He did not fear it, but he hated it with all of his heart and soul. A year and a half of incredible fear in the highlands of Vietnam had been transformed into an almost anguished love the living, intact moment, the moment that can never be possessed. Like many of the men who have witnessed the best and worst in themselves, who have been given a glimpse of the end of their lives at a very young age, he had lost the power to be lonely. The power had been replaced by something else: a soul sickness; a hunger for beauty, but only at a distance. Though he could not love his own life and the things within it, Jesse hated death.

His newest client is a 12-year-old boy, a child of the projects who's been charged with the brutal murder of two women. As the case unfolds, the barriers between past and present, America and Vietnam, erode and finally disappear. Meanwhile, Vea expertly marries the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez to his visceral accounts of battle. Indeed, whether we measure by the breadth of his imagination, the strength of his characters, or the hallucinatory power of his prose, there seems to be no novelistic terrain that Vea can't conquer. A chronicle of defeat and suffering, Gods Go Begging represents a paradoxical victory for the author--and, of course, for the reader. --Ted Leventhal

About the Author:

Alfredo Vea was born in Arizona and worked as a migrant farm worker as a child and a young man. He served in Vietnam and after his discharge worked a series of jobs, ranging from truck driver to carnival mechanic, as he put himself through law school. Now a practicing criminal defense attorney, Vea is also the author of two previous novels, La Maravilla and The Silver Cloud Caf. He lives in San Francisco, California.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dutton Adult
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 052594513X
• ISBN 13: 9780525945130
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320