The Movies of My Life [Hardcover]

"This is one of the drawbacks to being a seismologist: I always look deeper, I search for the cracks, I scan for flaws and resistances." So begins the story of Beltran Soler, a Chilean earthquake specialist born in Chile but who lived in California for a few years before returning to his country of origin at the age of ten. His emotional state as an adult appears to be about as stable as one of the fault lines he examines as part of his job. While taking a trip to a conference in Japan, he learns from his sister that his grandfather died in an earthquake in El Salvador. With this knowledge already eating him up inside, he meets a woman on a plane who tells him about someone who wrote a book about the greatest movies of their life. Suddenly inspired to replicate this feat, Soler stays over in California for a few days and furiously types his own list of influential films in an e-mail to this anonymous woman. What follows is an often painful excursion through the trials and tribulations of a young boy caught between two mutually exclusive worlds. "The Movies of My Life" is fictional, although it is important to note that Fuguet himself lived in California as a youth just as the Beltran character did.

Each movie in the list touches off an intimate memory of some aspect of Beltran Soler's life. The first twenty-five films explore his early life as a Chilean immigrant in Southern California, with a movie like "Woodstock" bringing to the surface a recollection of Beltran's Uncle Carlos's countercultural attitudes. Another film, "Krakatoa, East of Java," provides a memory of his Grandfather Teodoro, the man who influenced Beltran to become a seismologist and the one who died recently in El Salvador. Not all of the films supply such easy connections, and for many pages the reader wonders where it is all going. As the book grows on you, and it will, a picture slowly begins to emerge about why Beltran is the way he is as a grown up. His family life was never easy, with his philandering father and sometimes touchy relatives always creating emotional rifts and fractures. When the Solers decide to pay a visit to relatives in Chile after the overthrow of the Allende regime, Beltran's world suddenly falls out from under him when his family decides to stay there permanently.

The next twenty-five films outline Beltran's life in Chile. An alien world after living in California for so long, the country's language, its schools, and its new leader General Pinochet serve as nearly insurmountable obstacles for the young boy to overcome. The movies continue to focus attention on specific incidents in Beltran's life. Issues hinted at in California now become full blown problems: his father and mother suffer a serious break, puberty arrives on the scene to wreak havoc on Beltran's existence, and he meets his first serious love. The final movie and the memory it brings back is simply devastating in its shocking power. I won't ruin it for you, but you will definitely find it surprising and horrific. Of course, not all of the memories are bad. Beltran remembers the family across the street who went on a television show singing tunes from "The Sound of Music," or the neighborhood friend in California who often recreated films like "The Poseidon Adventure" in his garage using his friends to act out the roles. There is plenty of good with the bad here, just like life, and all of it is so realistic that even now I have a difficult time thinking of "The Movies of My Life" as fiction.

I really got the sense I was reading great literature as I made my way through this book. It is too bad that many of this author's writings have yet to find an English translation. After reading "The Movies of My Life," I passed the book on to a family member who promises to give it to someone else after she finishes it. I am incredibly surprised to see no reviews for this book, but perhaps word of mouth will help spread the word about this marvelous Chilean novelist.

In each case, the movie serves as a launching point for exploring an event from his past and reconsidering it. What rapidly emerges is a picture of a man scarred by both the dysfunction and displacement of his upbringing. While in the LA, his life is relatively normal, and he grows up as a regular American boy, although as he looks back at that time, he recognizes the fragility of his parents' marriage and his father's distinct discomfort at being a father. However, the real damage comes at age 10, when this fully functional pop-culture saturated American boy moves back to Chile, where has a difficult time adjusting to the different language, social rules, and culture. Ultimately, this is a bittersweet and poignant coming-of-age story, as Beltran's friendless adolescence morphs into semi-acceptance as a teenager, and of course, his sexual awakening.

What is clear early on is the connection between his uncertain and capricious childhood and his adult fascination with earthquakes (events that shatter any illusion of stability, get it?). This is a bit of a heavy-handed maneuver, although the presence of a seismologist grandfather makes it all coalesce more than it might have. Throughout, moderately interesting issues of class and culture are raised, amidst this backdrop of films and growing pains. Fuget is the foremost of a loose band of younger Latin American writers who have rejected magical realism, and are attempting to forge a more real, modernist approach to literature. If this book is anything to judge by, it's a welcome change of pace.