LIBERATION OF LITTLE HEAVEN-C - Hardcover

Jacobs, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569471355 ISBN 13: 9781569471357

Publisher: Soho Press, 1999

Synopsis

Offers a collection of short stories set in South America whose title story describes a confrontation between a woman and the director of a girls' reformatory

About this title

About the Author

Mark Jacobs is a career foreign-service officer. He and his family have lived in Turkey, Paraguay, and Spain, and recently returned to the Washington, D.C., area.

From Kirkus Reviews

Thirteen stories in a second collection, mainly set in Paraguay, by US diplomat and novelist Jacobs (A Cast of Spaniards, 1994; Stone Cowboy, 1997). Jacobs mind seems divided on Paraguay, fascinated and horrified to an equal degree by its history, religion, and politics. The title story, for example, describes the life of one Arami Bedoya, a peasant taken from her parents as a child and raised in a secret orphanage maintained to provide the countrys President with a steady supply of young mistresses. After escaping her fate by running away, Arami is consumed by a lust for vengeance and plots an assassination. Down in Paraguay chronicles an Americans unhappy marriage to a local woman. The husband, discovering his wifes infidelity, considers murdering her and her lover, then gives up on the ideaonly to be urged on by his young son, who cannot bear the dishonor of his bad mother. The murderous obsession of an unhappily wedded army sergeant with a young actor dominates The Ballad of Tony Nail, while Mengele Dies Again portrays the Nazi physicians last days in Paraguay. The Rape of Reason is told from the perspective of Martin del Valle, a Bolivian intellectual from a prominent family whos raised in exile in the States but returns home to teach at the University of La Paz. Expelled from the university for his reactionary views, he becomes a journalist whos later threatened for opposing the government in his writing. The best piece here,Marina in the Key of Blue Flat, offers a portrait of a young housemaid who works for well-to-do Paraguayans and contrasts her own life with the privileges and fears of theirs. Sometimes unfocused and rambling, but, still, these sensitive insiders stories give a vivid glimpse of a country that may always come across as foreign. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Soho Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1569471355
• ISBN 13: 9781569471357
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 231