Few Americans know about Uruguay, but perhaps we should pay more attention to these countries where the US CIA and business have found so many reasons to interfere with the lives of the people who live there.
The book is about a young girl and her friends who grow up in an affluent neighborhood in Montevideo and their observations of life around them. Each of the neighbors is a story within a story and the girls grow older and more entwined with the complex threads that lead from each neighbor.
There are student protests, unfaithful men, women trapped in their sexist roles, young girls growing into puberty and adulthood. The narrator grows up with connections to the underprivileged and poor without understanding why there has to be such a difference between them.
She encounters the prejudice against Jews, the power of the landed, the oppression of the workers and the conflict between Russia and the US that makes pawns of the small countries.
Here are wonderful characters, none fully developed, but each with enough personality to make us care and think about who they are. In the time when this nation has openly engaged in torture it is still frightening to see the use of torture that is put in place in these countries of revolution and the way that its presence is swept away by government and media.
Power and frustration, individuals and the state, business and power all play a role and somehow individual lives still go on. The girls find love and purpose in their lives and yet each, despite the play that surrounds them, becomes individuals who stand alone even when they stand together.
It is so fun to delve in to another land and culture, but in this case the fun evolves to a tension and power that flows in to the lives of the principle characters and that power and oppression is never really resolved. For each person, it just is.
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