The Tattooed Soldier - Softcover

Héctor Tobar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852426497 ISBN 13: 9781852426491

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 2000

Synopsis

In a shabby apartment in downtown Los Angeles, Antonio Bernal waits to be evicted. It is the final defeat in a series of blows that drove him from Guatemala after a death squad murdered his wife and child, a boy of two. Not far from Antonio?s apartment, Guillermo Longoria is playing chess. Utterly absorbed in the game, he stretches for the queen revealing the tattoo on his arm which bears witness to his past - as a member of the Jaguar Battalion of the guatemalan Army. The Tattooed Soldier tells the riveting story of two haunted men and the fatal intersecting of their lives.

About this title

From the Publisher

An extraordinary novel, beautifully observed and driven by moral passion.

From the Author

If you are brave enough to travel through the seedier parts of downtown Los Angeles, you can see several of the sites that are the backdrop of my novel: homeless camps in abandoned tunnels, the brick tenements that are home to thousands of Central American immigrants, and the shopping strips that were turned to cinder and ash a few years back.

At its root, The Tattooed Soldier is the story of the conflict between the idea of Los Angeles as a place of unlimited freedom and opportunity, and the truth of the poverty and decay that have come to eat away at the very heart of the city. These concerns parallel my own dual life as a native Angeleno with roots in Guatemala. While I was growing up in affluent, ever-optimistic Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s, my family in Central America lived under a violent anti-Communist dictatorship. A war was being waged in Guatemala, just one of the many conflicts known collectively as the Cold War, all fought in the name of preserving the Pax Americana.

Eventually Los Angeles itself--perhaps the quintessential American city of the Cold War era--paid a price for maintaining the empire. I saw this firsthand when, in the late 1980s, I became a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and ventured into neighborhoods that had been assaulted by recession and the austerity of Reaganomics. Many of these neighborhoods were flooded with war refugees. It was here that I met the people and heard the stories that coalesced into The Tattooed Soldier.

Edition details

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852426497
• ISBN 13: 9781852426491
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320