Revolution

What's the title?

Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the Sandinistas

Who wrote it?

Deb Unferth Olin

When was it written?

2011

What star rating would you give it?

3.5/5

Would I recommend it?

Surprisingly, yes. I can’t say that when I gave that recommendation I’d be confident that the reader would enjoy it, but I would still give the recommendation with the hope that the reader would be pleasantly surprised by this book, just as I was.

What's it about? (non-spoilers)

Revolution is a memoir that follows the absurd, hilarious, and pathetic experiences of a white college girl’s travels under the auspices of helping Central American revolutionaries. She’s convinced to go on this ill-advised journey while under the influence of heady young love with her countercultural boyfriend, George. Readers also receive a glimpse of the fallout this trip has on her relationships with George, with Central America, with her family, and with herself.

What did you think? (spoilers)

I don’t know why I picked up this book. Sure, it was an impulse buy at a Library Book Sale and cost me next to nothing, but even a cheap purchase is still a purchase to my miserly mind. I spent money acquiring a book that I most likely wouldn’t pick up if I were scrolling the shelves of my library to borrow a book – and that's free.

There’s so much about this book that should turn me off. It’s about young love, something I have very curmudgeonly “get off my lawn” feelings about, a feeling that's compounded when characters act like a MORON on account of that young love. It’s about white Americans trying to co-opt the political difficulties of people of color, which is gross. And, what should be the final nail in the coffin, it’s a memoir.

Tom Clancy is attributed with saying “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” Therein lies my problem with memoirs. Memoirs ostensibly try to be a story – the story of someone’s real life, but still a story. And audiences intrinsically want stories to make sense, or at least I do. I want stories to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I want stories to have a theme, or a message, or some kind of an internal logic – I want something that strings all these events together. I want stories to make sense. But real life doesn’t make sense. So when reading a memoir, when reading a real life story, I find it usually fails at being real or it fails at being a story. Either way, the memoir is a failure.

Somehow, against all the odds, Revolution is a success.

That’s not to say Revolution is free from flaws. The writing, on a sentence by sentence level, is not great. It’s not bad. It’s serviceable, functional. The writing here does its job, but it never reaches the level of art. The other problems Unferth addresses, which doesn’t remove those problems but does manage to ameliorate them. This is a story of white kids playing around in Latinx peoples’ wars. Unferth recounts being chastised by locals for being tourists. There’s the problem of memory – something with which every memoirist struggles – and Unferth makes clear that she’s relying on the faulty source of her memory, relaying anecdotes as she remembers them but interspersing them with differing accounts from other people who were there. Still, despite these flaws, Revolution succeeds.

Now, I could be approaching this book from a particular bias. I’m a privileged white girl who has spent time in a country renowned for its political turmoil. Granted, I didn’t go as a revolutionary but rather as a student, and I didn’t go because my boyfriend talked me into it but for my own personal reasons. Still, there was so much about Unferth’s story that rang true for me, so many stories that seemed similar to mine, in essence, if not in the particulars. I know how the magic and the horror of a place can sit side by side and intertwined. I know how a place can bury you in trials and still dig its way so deeply into your skin that you are rendered incapable of wanting to escape. I know how a place that you have no claim to, that is not your home or home to your people, can capture your heart, can become a part of you in a real and tangible way. So maybe this is an Emiline book and the average Jo wouldn’t be able to get it.

Even so, even if I acknowledge a bias on account of my experience, I still think Revolution is a good memoir and a worthy read, if for no other reason than Unferth never tries to make sense of it all. These things happened to her, and sure they were weird things, atypical and unique, but she states herself that they weren’t exciting or impactful. This is not an unbelievable tale of adventure. In many ways her tales are underwhelming. But they’re true. They happened. And they mattered to her, even if she can’t articulate exactly why. Reading Revolution gave me the feeling of reading, not just reality, but truth. And really, what more can you ask from a book?

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