Kamchatka - Hardcover

Marcelo Figueras

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1843548267 ISBN 13: 9781843548263

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2010

Synopsis

In Buenos Aires, in the mid-Seventies, a ten-year-old boy lives in world of school lessons and Superman comics, TV shows and games of Risk - a world in which men have superpowers and boys can conquer the globe on a square of cardboard. But in the outside world, a military junta have taken power; and amid a political climate of fear and intimidation, people are beginning to disappear without trace - when his mother unexpectedly takes the boy and his kid brother out of classes, she tells them they're going on an impromptu family 'holiday'. But he soon realizes that the rules of the game are shifting. This will be no holiday: his parents are known supporters of the opposition, and they are going into hiding - holed up in a ramshackle safe-house in the remote hills outside the city, they assume new identities and make believe that life continues as normal. Naming himself Harry, after his hero Houdini, the boy spends his days of enforced exile learning the secrets of escape. And in a world of seeming chaos and uncertainty, he attempts to imagine he has control over himself and his surroundings. A deeply moving and wise novel, written with immense heart, "Kamchatka" is an adventure story about a young boy forced to square fantasy against reality when reality and all its trappings - family, politics, history, and time itself - are more improbable than any fiction. Ultimately, it is a novel about the imaginative spaces we retreat to when we need to make sense of an unimaginable world.

About this title

About the Author

Marcelo Figueras, born in Buenos Aires in 1962, is a writer and a screenwriter.

From Publishers Weekly

In this meandering English-language debut from Figueras, a 10-year-old Argentinean boy's whimsical inner life helps him both explain and digest his family's fate in the aftermath of the 1976 coup. When his parents' leftist activism forces the family into hiding, the boy decides to call himself Harry after his idol, Houdini. Ensconced in a villa outside Buenos Aires, Harry staves off the boredom of being in hiding by playing the board game Risk (his favorite territory being the novel's namesake), working out with the cool 18-year-old activist staying with the family, and fantastical forays into the lives of his various heroes—Superman, Aristotle, Arthur of Avalon—whose stories Harry relates to his own life with uninhibited passion. The reader knows from the first chapter that Harry's family will be torn apart, yet Figueras is intent on leaving out any "grown-up" facts that would explain the ordeal, focusing instead on Harry's reflections on the malleability of memory. Yet because of the narrator's young age, conclusions such as "Time is weird" might feel more astute if they were grounded in a more trenchant narrative. (May)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1843548267
• ISBN 13: 9781843548263
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256