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3.92 AVERAGE
3.92 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
sad
medium-paced
This was such a powerful book. I am so grateful I stumbled upon this book when it was mentioned in the 150 years of Canada book as a recommended one regarding a modern Canadian author. This book certainly packed a punch. This is a heavy autobiography for it deals with many difficult subject matters. Her family, exiled from Chile in the late 1970's and whom move to Vancouver Canada are a few tidbits that just scratch the surface of the beginning of the novel. Carmen's parents ultimately divorce and her mother takes up with a man named Bob and together, they join a resistance movement that takes them back into South America (Bolivia and then Argentina) along with Carmen and her sister Ale. Her mother and stepfather certainly made some poor decisions at times, for the cause was their number one priority not their children. This truly affected Carmen throughout her youth in many ways.
However, stunningly, Carmen joins the resistance movement herself when her family gives it up. Her own descriptions of the risks she took for the cause are compelling and emotional. I was gripped by her strength, something many of us would not have the guts to do. The descriptions of South America in the 1970's and 1980's, particularly the atrocities that the US inflicted on some in Central America as well as Grenada and South America were eye-opening and startling. The US clearly would like to remain number one by any means necessary, even if it means loss of civilians by the thousands. A disgusting part of US history that is simply swept under the rug that needs to be discussed more readily.
I would have read this book faster had life not gotten in the way so much. A compelling read about a Modern Canadian (she ultimately moves back to Canada in case you are wondering how she is a Canadian).
However, stunningly, Carmen joins the resistance movement herself when her family gives it up. Her own descriptions of the risks she took for the cause are compelling and emotional. I was gripped by her strength, something many of us would not have the guts to do. The descriptions of South America in the 1970's and 1980's, particularly the atrocities that the US inflicted on some in Central America as well as Grenada and South America were eye-opening and startling. The US clearly would like to remain number one by any means necessary, even if it means loss of civilians by the thousands. A disgusting part of US history that is simply swept under the rug that needs to be discussed more readily.
I would have read this book faster had life not gotten in the way so much. A compelling read about a Modern Canadian (she ultimately moves back to Canada in case you are wondering how she is a Canadian).
For me, this book was a page turner. I don't read a lot of non-fiction and I thought this book was great.
The other reviewers on here have given great descriptions of the story so I won't go into detail. The author chronicles growing up and living in various places during the Pinochet regime in Argentina in the 1980s. Her whole family is involved in the resistance.
Reading about her life through her teen years is incredible. What was I doing when I was 12, 13, 14? I can tell you what I was not doing. I was not moving from house to house to avoid detection. I was not living in fear of being picked up by the police, knowing I would be tortured and perhaps killed. I was not memorizing documents and then having to burn them because they were so incriminating. I was not trained to keep secrets and learn false identities. I was not going to strange places to pass information along to strangers and hope that I have identified the right person. It goes on.
I heard the author being interviewed on CBC about her subsequent book, which is about a different topic. That's what lead me to this book. How she survived her growing up is a testament to her strength and spirit.
The description on Goodreads says that this book is "darkly comic", which I don't see at all. Some of her stories certainly deal with the mundane aspects of the life of a teenager but "darkly comic"? Not in my eyes.
I'm glad I read it.
The other reviewers on here have given great descriptions of the story so I won't go into detail. The author chronicles growing up and living in various places during the Pinochet regime in Argentina in the 1980s. Her whole family is involved in the resistance.
Reading about her life through her teen years is incredible. What was I doing when I was 12, 13, 14? I can tell you what I was not doing. I was not moving from house to house to avoid detection. I was not living in fear of being picked up by the police, knowing I would be tortured and perhaps killed. I was not memorizing documents and then having to burn them because they were so incriminating. I was not trained to keep secrets and learn false identities. I was not going to strange places to pass information along to strangers and hope that I have identified the right person. It goes on.
I heard the author being interviewed on CBC about her subsequent book, which is about a different topic. That's what lead me to this book. How she survived her growing up is a testament to her strength and spirit.
The description on Goodreads says that this book is "darkly comic", which I don't see at all. Some of her stories certainly deal with the mundane aspects of the life of a teenager but "darkly comic"? Not in my eyes.
I'm glad I read it.
I really wanted to love this one since it was the winner of the Canada Reads 2012 and I did like it but I didn't love it. I would give it another 1/2 star if possible.
I certainly learned a lot about Latin America, although at times I flip back and forth to keep track of the different leaders and what Country they were from.
I expected more emotion from the author since it was her story to tell - there is a lot of description of what happens but not a lot about how these journeys affected her. I can't even image what it would have been like to live that life.
I certainly learned a lot about Latin America, although at times I flip back and forth to keep track of the different leaders and what Country they were from.
I expected more emotion from the author since it was her story to tell - there is a lot of description of what happens but not a lot about how these journeys affected her. I can't even image what it would have been like to live that life.
A good read but I really didn't feel like there was enough about why exactly the resistance in South America was necessary, etc. Knowing next to nothing about South American politics probably didn't help me here, but I didn't really feel like I was rooting for the revolutionaries and it seems like a book that should have had me doing so.
Review originally posted on www.christinavasilevski.com
About the book: Carmen Aguirre was born in Chile, and lived there with her family until Pinochet's coup in 1973. After the coup, they fled to Vancouver and supported Chile's resistance movement from afar. A few years after entering Canada, however, Aguirre's parents split and her mother started a relationship with a Canadian political activist.
Ultimately, Aguirre, her sister, and her stepfather left Vancouver (and Aguirre's father) behind and returned to Latin America, travelling between Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina to support the movement against Pinochet. Something Fierce documents the reality of living a double life - bourgeois importers and teachers on one hand, and underground revolutionaries on the other - as Aguirre shuttles back and forth between Canada and Latin America and lives in a state of perpetual uncertainty.
What I liked: This book provides a rare and detailed glimpse into the life of being an underground revolutionary, and the stresses that such a life entails. Imagine being tailed by a government operative - how do you move around in a supermarket so as to avoid suspicion and evade capture? Suppose that your parents have been absent from your hotel room for over 24 hours, and you have to notify the other members in your underground cell by dialing a phone number you don't know, speaking a strange code, burning all evidence of the paper the number was written down on, flushing the ashes down the toilet, and waiting for your rescuer to pick you up - could you remember what to do or say?
Aguirre doesn't flinch from discussing the hazards of underground life, like wallpapering a safe house in newspaper so that any revolutionaries detained by the police wouldn't be able to give a meaningful description of what it looked like inside. The riotous life and colour in La Paz, and Aguirre's happiness to be there, are thoroughly evoked. Amazingly, Aguirre doesn't play the my-childhood-was-miserable game that so many other memoirists do. I was constantly surprised by how little anger she directed towards her family for dragging her into a world so full of danger, violence, and fear.
What I disliked: Despite the vivid detail Aguirre includes about the demands of being a revolutionary and the excitement of living in Latin America, I still never got a sense of who the characters were as people. Aguirre mentions several times that Bob Everton, her stepfather, had a temper that could flare up at a moment's notice, but this is described rather than experienced, and his outbursts are never explained - was he a naturally angry man, or was he reacting to the stress of living a double life?
In addition, I also wanted to know more about Aguille's sister, Ale. It's hinted throughout Something Fierce that Ale wasn't nearly as accepting of the family's political activities as Aguirre was. The author acknowledges at the end of the book that Ale wanted her story to remain private; Aguirre does her best to fulfill her sister's wishes, but that comes at the expense of sidelining her. I think it would have been interesting to see more clearly how Ale's opinions and desires dissented from those of the rest of her family.
Other pivotal events in the story were discussed, but felt underdeveloped and glossed over. These include Aguirre meeting and marrying her compañero Alejandro, the revelation that that her seemingly pro-Pinochet grandmother was also part of the resistance movement, and the family's subsequent decision to alternate routinely between living in Vancouver and living in Latin America.
Finally, because this is a book about Latin American politics, it contains a lot of information needed to get the reader up to speed. If you know a lot about 20th-Century Latin American history already, you'll breeze through the summaries Aguirre inserts, but otherwise, it gets a bit infodump-y.
The verdict: Although there were flaws, I enjoyed Something Fierce. Its strengths lie in evoking a time and a place and in describing the various subterfuges needed to participate in an underground resistance while living a "normal" life to avoid suspicion. I have a profound respect for Aguirre's tenacity and her continued love for her family despite the danger that her mother and stepfather exposed her to.
About the book: Carmen Aguirre was born in Chile, and lived there with her family until Pinochet's coup in 1973. After the coup, they fled to Vancouver and supported Chile's resistance movement from afar. A few years after entering Canada, however, Aguirre's parents split and her mother started a relationship with a Canadian political activist.
Ultimately, Aguirre, her sister, and her stepfather left Vancouver (and Aguirre's father) behind and returned to Latin America, travelling between Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina to support the movement against Pinochet. Something Fierce documents the reality of living a double life - bourgeois importers and teachers on one hand, and underground revolutionaries on the other - as Aguirre shuttles back and forth between Canada and Latin America and lives in a state of perpetual uncertainty.
What I liked: This book provides a rare and detailed glimpse into the life of being an underground revolutionary, and the stresses that such a life entails. Imagine being tailed by a government operative - how do you move around in a supermarket so as to avoid suspicion and evade capture? Suppose that your parents have been absent from your hotel room for over 24 hours, and you have to notify the other members in your underground cell by dialing a phone number you don't know, speaking a strange code, burning all evidence of the paper the number was written down on, flushing the ashes down the toilet, and waiting for your rescuer to pick you up - could you remember what to do or say?
Aguirre doesn't flinch from discussing the hazards of underground life, like wallpapering a safe house in newspaper so that any revolutionaries detained by the police wouldn't be able to give a meaningful description of what it looked like inside. The riotous life and colour in La Paz, and Aguirre's happiness to be there, are thoroughly evoked. Amazingly, Aguirre doesn't play the my-childhood-was-miserable game that so many other memoirists do. I was constantly surprised by how little anger she directed towards her family for dragging her into a world so full of danger, violence, and fear.
What I disliked: Despite the vivid detail Aguirre includes about the demands of being a revolutionary and the excitement of living in Latin America, I still never got a sense of who the characters were as people. Aguirre mentions several times that Bob Everton, her stepfather, had a temper that could flare up at a moment's notice, but this is described rather than experienced, and his outbursts are never explained - was he a naturally angry man, or was he reacting to the stress of living a double life?
In addition, I also wanted to know more about Aguille's sister, Ale. It's hinted throughout Something Fierce that Ale wasn't nearly as accepting of the family's political activities as Aguirre was. The author acknowledges at the end of the book that Ale wanted her story to remain private; Aguirre does her best to fulfill her sister's wishes, but that comes at the expense of sidelining her. I think it would have been interesting to see more clearly how Ale's opinions and desires dissented from those of the rest of her family.
Other pivotal events in the story were discussed, but felt underdeveloped and glossed over. These include Aguirre meeting and marrying her compañero Alejandro, the revelation that that her seemingly pro-Pinochet grandmother was also part of the resistance movement, and the family's subsequent decision to alternate routinely between living in Vancouver and living in Latin America.
Finally, because this is a book about Latin American politics, it contains a lot of information needed to get the reader up to speed. If you know a lot about 20th-Century Latin American history already, you'll breeze through the summaries Aguirre inserts, but otherwise, it gets a bit infodump-y.
The verdict: Although there were flaws, I enjoyed Something Fierce. Its strengths lie in evoking a time and a place and in describing the various subterfuges needed to participate in an underground resistance while living a "normal" life to avoid suspicion. I have a profound respect for Aguirre's tenacity and her continued love for her family despite the danger that her mother and stepfather exposed her to.
made me very emotional towards the end. reading about the things that Carmen and her family put themselves through and had to endure for a resistance movement that ended up not succeeding was heartbreaking but also rather inspiring. i knew very little about Latin America’s recent history before reading this, but i’ve been visiting Chile and wanted to learn more. i think there’s alot that current day radicals can learn from the Chilean resistance (and the movements throughout LatAm), both from its organisational successes to its failures resulting from rigid radicalism. As Carmen Aguirre notes in the epilogue, “what was required was absolute commitment, body and soul. I wonder if that’s one of the reasons we lost, the reason so many struggles are lost - the inhuman demands placed on those who are fighting for the dream. We lived in a state of terror, and it was unrevolutionary to feel it, let alone speak of it. I tried to be a hero, but I was just the opposite: a teenager fucking up all over the place who wanted to give everything to the struggle.”
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
adventurous
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Incredibly well written & enticing. I didn’t even notice I was reading non-fiction (which I find hard to focus on). I learned so much about the politics and revolutionary movements of South America in 1970s-1990s. It ended incredibly abruptly which was maybe a power move as it left me with conflicting feelings and a bunch of convoluted thoughts. Definitely recommend.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse, Racism, Torture, Violence, Xenophobia, Vomit, Police brutality, Trafficking, Abandonment, War, Deportation