Book: The Massacre at El Mozote, Mark Danner
Start Date: 01/11/06
End Date: 9/1/06
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After my father and I saw “Hotel Rwanda” last year he said to me, “These movies, they sometimes exaggerate the details to make the story more compelling.”

“What parts do you think they exaggerated?” I asked.

“I can’t believe that people would target children,” he said.

I looked out the car window and puzzled over this statement for a brief second or two.

“But they do,” I said quietly.

“No. Maybe as collateral damage,” he said. “A stray bullet but not deliberately taking a machete and killing them,” he said. I watched him as he drove, quietly realizing that in his mind, in his world, men who purposefully hurt children don’t exist.

“Didn’t you read the things that were done in El Salvador during the war? Whole families were massacred. Not soldiers or guerillas. Just families, living their lives.”

He only nodded.

I decided to leave that conversation thread alone. Who am I to try and shatter his vision of the world?

It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that my father and I don’t share the same experiences of the war in El Salvador. He left El Salvador in 1974; the quiet murmurs of unrest had begun by then but they wouldn’t reach a fever pitch until the mid ‘80s. By then my mother, brother and I had joined my father in the States.

He didn’t have to experience going blocks out of his way in order to avoid heavily secured areas. He wasn’t there to hear planes flying overhead and bombs dropping miles away. I remember having to sleep in a different room every night because my mother couldn’t decide which bedroom was safer: the front bedroom in case we needed to make a fast escape or the back bedroom in case fighting broke out and bullets ripped into the front of the house? I remember a friend running out into the street demanding a gun so that he could hunt down his father’s killers. The boy was only 11. I remember family and neighbors crying for dead sons, missing daughters; parents fearing their children would be made to take up a gun and pick a side.

But those things were just the tip of the iceberg. Back then I had no idea what was really going on, the fighting was still new and mostly relagated to the countryside. By the time things got really bad in the major cities, we’d left the country. It wasn’t until I was older that I learned of the atrocities that were carried out in the name of justice, the pure evil that men are capable of in time of unrest. The stories shame, anger and sadden me.

“The Massacre at el Mozote” is just the kind of book that I would never recommend to my father. In December 1981 soldiers entered the small village of El Mozote and murdered hundreds of men, women and children. These people were not guerillas, they were not soldiers. They were civilians just trying to make it day by day, but the military’s original plan of surrounding the guerillas at El Mozote failed so they developed plan B—to burn everything and everyone down in order to eradicate insurgency at its roots. Though the major military officials kept telling the soldiers that what they’d done was “just war” and that they were carrying justice out, a great deal of work went into keeping the truth from the public, at home and worldwide. The United States government, who at the time was heavily funding the Salvadoran government and military, dismissed any true accounts of what happened at El Mozote as leftist propaganda.

Danner’s recounting of what went on is hard to ignore. He’s meticously researched the events and included many of the actual sources. As I stumble through the chapter were he describes how dozens and dozens of children were brutally killed, I ask myself why I’m reading this. Then I remember a conversation my mother and I had a few days ago. She told me that a man she’d recently met asked her why Salvadorans are so rude and unwelcoming and why the country was so poor and run down and why we’d behaved the way we did during the war. She was incensed. Her exact response escapes me at the moment but the gist is that she denied that any atrocities had happened during the war.

I shook my head. “I can understand being annoyed by this man,” I said. “God only knows who’s pissed him off and he’s using that to make ridiculous generalizations, but putting that aside, you cannot deny that we did horrible things to our own people, that soldiers killed and tortured children, that the government betrayed its people. It may be hard to admit, especially to some idiot intent on being insulting, but it happened. There’s no wishing that away.”

She remembers quite well the things that went on, but she would rather pretend to not know what I’m talking about, to hide that ugly time in history under the rug, to push it as far away from consciousness as possible. I think that’s why I force myself through books such as this one; because someone has to remember, someone has to talk about it, difficult as it is. Someone has to remember so that the deaths of all those innocent men, women and children weren’t in vain.

Book: Memoria de mis putas tristes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Start Date: 11/19/05
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Uma Thurman has a line in “The Truth About Cats and Dogs” that goes something like, “I’m reading two books at the moment. The book that Brian gave us and a dictionary to understand the book that Brian gave us.”

That’s the way I’m feeling right now trying to get through “Memoria de mis putas tristes” by Gabriel García Márquez. The book is just a little over a hundred pages and yet I’ve been reading it for, god, two months now. If that’s not ridiculous I don’t know what is. I thought for sure I’d be able to get through it while in El Salvador for a couple of reasons: a) I’d have a lot of reading time and b) I’d be talking exclusively in Spanish and I thought that’d help me get into the proper mindset. While I certainly had plenty of time, the language still posed a problem. The book is riddled with words I do not understand* which, because I had no dictionary with me, I just tracked on the index card I was using as a bookmark. (Wouldn’t you know that the silly card is nowhere to be found now that I do have access to a dictionary?)

Part of me wants to give up, admit defeat and just buy the book in English, but I can’t do that. I’ve gone through this before. Several years ago, while I was reading “Santitos” by Maria Amparo Escandon, I had trouble as well. It took me nearly two years to finish that book. I’d read a chapter or two, get frustrated by my inablity to blaze through it and put it down for a couple of months. Because the story was good (and I’m all shades of stubborn) I kept going back to it, till I finished. The Christmas after I finished the book, while on a trip to El Salvador, a friend asked me if I’d been taking Spanish lessons. “No,” I said, guilty and embarrassed because I knew that I should have. “Well, something is different. Your Spanish is better.” The only thing that I could attribute the improvement to was the reading of the book.

Since then, I’ve bought quite a few books in Spanish, but being the lazybones that I am, I haven’t made any real progress on any of them. Instead I keep picking up books written in English (and even most of those I find that I’m having trouble focusing on lately). But not being able to breeze through Memoria has put me in a bad mood. Which is good because I’m just frustrated enough to get back on the horse, and am once again determined to read more books in Spanish so that both my verbal and reading comprehension skills improve. If I do this right, maybe on my next trip my friend will once again notice how I can totally rock the Spanish. Eh. At the very least, I’ll confuse less people!

For those of you not familiar with the book ... “Memoria de mis putas tristes” is the story of an aging reporter who decides to give himself a gift for his 90th birthday—a young virgin. All his life he’s only had sex with whores and has never known love, till now. He spends the night watching the naked girl sleep. Hardly what he was expecting and that night sets in place an obsession that I can only guess will last to his last days. That, however, is a guess since I’m still only 43 pages into the book. At this rate, I’ll still be reading in December! Just in time for my next Salvadoran vacation

*Then again, it is a García Márquez book. Even if I were reading it in English, I’d probably still have to read it several times to really understand all the nuances.

Book: Annie Freeman’s Fabulous Traveling Funeral, Kris Radish
Start Date: 02/09/06
End Date: 03/14/06
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Book: Son of a Witch, Gregory Maguire
Start Date: 01/07/06
End Date: 01/15/06
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Comments: 2
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Book: Vanishing Acts, Jodi Picoult
Start Date: 01/04/06
End Date: 01/11/06
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Book: The Dirty Girls Social Club, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
Start Date: 12/30/05
End Date: 01/03/06
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It feels a bit like cheating to say I finished this book since I skipped so much of the final chapters. I just couldn’t take it any more. If it weren’t for the fact that the characters were Latinas I probably wouldn’t have bothered to continue reading. I realize chick lit is very formulaic and normally I don’t have a problem with that, but this took it too far. The author kept drumming into us that the five sucias (dirty girls) are all professional, smart, put together women, but their personal lives are a mess. Again, not unheard of in a book of this genre. I think it was the fact that the dysfunction was mulitiplied by six that finally got to me. You’d think or you’d hope that out of six women, one of them would have had it together.  At the start of the book, I idly wished that I could attend the dirty girls social club reunions. By the time I was done with the book, I was relieved it was just a book and that I don’t actually know any of these women since not a single one appealed to me.

Book: Sammy’s Hill, Kristin Gore
Start Date: 12/23/05
End Date: 12/26/05
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Book: The Woman Who Walked to Russia: A Writer’s Search for a Lost Legend, Cassanda Pybus
Start Date: 02/17/08
End Date: 06/26/08
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Book: Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld
Start Date: 12/02/05
End Date: 12/10/05
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Book: Zero: The Biography of Dangerous Idea, Charles Seife
Start Date: 07/04/05
End Date: 12/02/05
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Okay. I think five months is long enough. I really liked reading about the history of how zero came to be, but the last few chapters are really math heavy and I have absolutely no head for numbers. If it were my book, I’d just put it on the hiatus list and come back to it later, but I borrowed it from a friend and I think it’s about time the book found its way back home.