Kamchatka [Paperback]

Marcelo Figueras is an Argentina writer and film maker born in the early sixties he has written four novels and wrote for various spanish magazines ,This is his first book to be translated into english

The last thing papa said to me ,the last word from his lips ,was "Kamchatka " .

He kissed me ,his stubble scratching my cheek ,then climbed into the Citroen .The car moved of along the undulating ribbon of road ,a green bubble bobbing into view with every hill,getting smaller and smaller until I couldn't see it any More .

The open ,what did his father mean !

Right the book ,it is set in seventies just after a coup and the period called the dirty war ,the book is narrated by a ten-year old boy ,for most of the book called Harry a name chosen by the young boy as his hero is the legendary escape artist Harry Houdini ,as he parts Left wingers are forced to flee their home in Buenos Aires to head to a safe house in the back and beyond of Argentine .the book is divide into parts each relating to a school day ,This book is from Harry's point of view and a bit like Wil Wheaton says in stand by me the days when you're the age before you discover girls are the best and this is Harry ,yes there is Danger but Harry is more interest in Tv and drinking Nesquik .he talks about the Midget it took me a couple mentions to realised this was his younger brother a close relationship beautifully portrayed .Harry compares people he meets to the characters he sees on tv mainly from his favourite show Invaders ,which I vaguely remember seeing as a Kid myself .also the saint which I loved myself as a kid .Childhood is a large chunk of this book ,I would imagine a lot of the likes and worries of Harry are from Marcelo's own childhood although he is a few years older than Harry when the book is set .Marcelo also is a wonderful visual writer ,bring the places the family visit along the way to Life so much .This is a refreshing change to other Latin American books based round coups which on whole have been dark and more political ,here we get a reflection on how these events effect a family ,we `ve all heard about people going on the run ,now here is a book that shows it through a child's eyes. The book has been made into a successful Film in Argentina which was Argentina choice for the foreign Oscar in 2002 .The book was translated by Frank terrible-man Wynne with real lightness the story flows and sometimes you forget this wasn't written in English .This is on this years Independent foreign fiction prize long list and hopefully shortlist .so what did his fathers last words mean ? well you'll have to read the book to find out !!

Propped up on top of my book shelves is a grainy black and white photo of a young couple that I bought in March in Cordoba, Argentina, at a museum dedicated to the thousands of people who disappeared during the military dictatorship. My photo shows Liliana Barrios. The information on the back tells that she was the mother of two young children and was executed by the junta in 1976.

Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras is set in this dark period of Argentina's recent past. Two young boys move with their parents from Buenos Aires to a safe house in the country. The elder one (never named) is increasingly resentful of leaving his friends and his toys. When his parents tell the boys to adopt new names he chooses Harry after his hero Harry Houdini. He practises holding his breath, tying knots and developing his strength and escapes into a fantasy world of comic book superheroes, Robin Hood, King Arthur and The Invaders. The story is recounted by Harry in a mixture of child-like naïvety and adult philosophy. This could have been irritating but actually it works very well. The writing is straightforward but bursting with ideas and childish observations.

Kamchatka could have been a very depressing book but there is humour throughout. The loving parents could have come over as saints but Harry finds them constantly annoying and difficult. He feels his younger brother, Midget, has inbuilt destructive powers and was put on earth to punish him.

At the heart of the book is the metaphor of Kamchatka - the semi-mythical place of refuge and safety from the board game Risk. By escaping to Kamchatka Harry is eventually able to come to terms with his family's tragic history.

The translation is excellent. Frank Wynne-Jones has succeeded in translating the many jokes and puns - not the easiest of tasks.

This is a beautifully written and cleverly crafted novel with hardly a surplus word. Highly recommended.

The past is neither dead nor past in Marcelo Figueras' beautifully crafted Kamchatka.

The Kamchatka Peninsula is the northeastern-most part of Russia and the old Soviet Union. It is surrounded by the Bering Sea, the Arctic, and the Pacific oceans. It was a cold-forbidding place, one that served as the destination point for thousands of Soviet citizens sent to spend time in the Gulag. It is also one of geographic points of interest in the old military board game Risk. The idea of Kamchatka, as set out in the board game, as a place of exile, and ultimately as a place of refuge forms the emotional core of the book around which the story revolves.

Set in Argentina in 1976, Kamchatka is the story of a young boy and his family. Argentina in 1976 was a dangerous place. The regime of Isabel Peron was ousted in a military coup followed by some extraordinarily repressive measures against suspected opponents of the junta. Thousands of people disappeared and most all of them were murdered. Kamchatka is the story of one family. Kamchatka is told in the form of a memoir written by Harry as he is known to us. Harry was 10 when the story begins. His parents are opponents of the regime and in short order Harry and his family flee from Buenos Aires to a secluded `summer cottage' where they can, hopefully, survive until the troubles are over. The family all take new names, the boy chooses to become Harry in honor of his boyhood hero, Harry Houdini.

The act of memory, of remembering, is critical to the story-line. Early on Figueras writes that sometimes, "as I remember, my voice is that of the ten-year-old boy I was then; sometimes the voice of the seventy-year-old man I am yet to be; sometimes it is my voice, at the age I am now . . . or the age I think I am. Who I have been, who I am, who I will be are all in continual conversation, each influencing the other." In lesser hands this would be nothing more than literary boilerplate, a snippet of philosophy before the writer moves on to the `heart' of the story. Although most of the story is written through the eyes of a ten-year-old, Figueras manages to insert the narrator's other voices at certain points of the book and he manages to do it seamlessly. As I read the book I could hear the different voices but the transition seemed totally natural and unaffected to me.

The structure of the story reinforces the use of those differing voices. The story's first and last chapters tell the same story; an encounter between father and son involving the word "Kamchatka" serves (in a manner reminiscent of Orson Welles' Rosebud) as both the opening note and grace-note of the tale. But as the story ends that grace note carries a far different meaning and sounds to be from a far-different voice from the ten-years olds' first telling - - -even though the words are almost the same.

Aldous Huxley once said that "[e]very man's memory is his private literature." In this instance Marcelo Figueras has taken the private literature of young Harry and turned it into a beautiful public piece of literature. This is a book that really deserves to find a wide audience.