Rites: A Childhood in Guatemala - Softcover

Victor Perera

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1906011249 ISBN 13: 9781906011246

Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd, 2013

Synopsis

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Latino/Latina Studies. Jewish Studies. RITES is Perera's powerful portrait of growing up as a Jewish boy in the exotic and violent world of Guatamala in the forties. "Victor Perera is one of those rare writers who need never suffer the uncertainties of translation, for besides his fluency in both English and Spanish, he has both a Latin American and a North American sensibility. RITES is another fine example of how affectingly he can cross from one to the other, bringing all his insights with him"--Alastair Reid.

About this title

Review:

Greatly entertaining, certainly one of the most entertaining books I have read in a long time. -- Ian Thomson, The Independent

Perera demonstrates a lively wit on every page. -- The Times Literary Supplement

Perera has brought that curious shape on the map to life. -- The Sunday Morning Post

Rites is an important book for anyone who wants a fuller understanding of the reality of Central America. -- San Francisco Chronicle

Victor Perera's Rites is enjoyable, enlightening, sometimes even startling. -- Norman Lewis, The Weekend Telegraph

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The presidency of General Jorge Ubico spanned the first ten years of my life. As I was growing up he came to represent not only fatherly caudillo and Lord of the Manor, but quite literally the Man on the White Horse: One a year, on his birthday, he paraded the length of Sexta Avenida on a magnificent prancing stallion. The rest of the time he was the ubiquitous but unseen Presence, manifest in the snap of the Honor Guard’s boots as they marched past the National Palace, in the whipped faces of the Indians who swept the city’s streets, and in the slouch and shuffle of chain-ganged convicts who built the country’s roads. I felt his presence most intimately in the mammoth gray eminence, his cousin La Maciste, as she strode mannishly up and down Parque Central during her morning constitutional.

In November 1938, when I was not yet five, President Ubico commemorated the seventh anniversary of his rule with a Feria Nacional that was to rival in everything but size the World’s Fair in New York. I was taken to the fair by pretty Edna, who had just turned sixteen and was wearing lipstick and silk stockings for the first time. The jasmine scent she had sprayed on herself imparts a sickly sweet redolence to my memories of that day.

The most interesting place in all the fair was a large area encircled by a tall bamboo fence. In one corner of this enclosure, behind a smaller fence guarded by soldiers, a group of Lacandones lived in huts of bamboo and thatch. The men on display wore dirty white shifts, and they had lighter skins than the Indians I saw in the street - lighter even than El Sincarne, the crippled beggar Elvira had said was a Lacandon. Like El Sincarne’s the hair of the Lacandones grew down to their shoulders, so you could not be certain of their sex. But unlike El Sincarne, whose hair was straight and smooth, their hair was thickly matted, as if it had never been combed. Edna said they rubbed ox-dung on their hair, which is why it was so unruly; but she smiled when she said this, so I took it to be a joke. All the Lacandones walked in a half-crouch, as if the roofs of their huts were too low. One of the men came out of his hut and walked right to the place at the fence where we stood. He looked down at me with sad, beautiful eyes and made a noise in his throat. "Tennh," he said again, and stuck his hand through a hole in the fence like the chimpanzee in the zoo. But a soldier pulled him away before I could decide whether to give him a coin or a stale chocolate in my trouser pocket, as my heart thumped against my ribs.

Outside one of the huts a woman weaved on a loom a beautiful cloth with bands of bright colours running across it. Edna said she was just an ordinary Indian from Solola, not a Lacandona. She said the Ladandones were as old as the Maya, who had lived in Guatemala many years before the Spanish arrived.

About this edition

• Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1906011249
• ISBN 13: 9781906011246
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 220