From Here To Eternity (Motorcycle Diaries, The - Ernesto Che Guevara)

Member Name: michaelhudson

Product:	Motorcycle Diaries, The - Ernesto Che Guevara
Date:	18/07/03 (935 review reads)
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Che Guevara: Marxist icon, revolutionary theorist, doctor, teacher, diplomat, political leader, guerrilla fighter, "the most complete human being of our age", asthmatic motorcyclist.

'Motorcycle Diaries' begins in November 1951. Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, a 23-year-old medical student from an upper middle class family in Buenos Aries, is fantasizing about faraway places, tropical seas and Asia with his friend, Alberto Granado. On a whim, they decide to travel to North America on 'La Poderosa' (the Powerful One), a 500cc Norton motorcycle. What follows is an almost entirely improvised six-month curve through five "unstable and illusory nations" full of mishaps, mad adventures and riotous scheming.

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"The person who wrote these notes died the day he stepped back on Argentine soil. Wandering around our 'America with a capital A' has changed me more than I thought."
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Three years before his real political awakening during the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala, five years before he boarded the Granma, and sixteen years before his execution in Vallegrande, the Ernesto Guevara who rides out of Buenos Aries is witty, laddish, ironic and politically incorrect. This is very much the man before the icon, a "motorized bum" who cadges bed and board at hospitals and police stations, spins sob stories and tall tales, kills time in museums and makes "flashy tackles" on the football pitch. Ernesto and Alberto work as removal men and volunteer fire fighters; in Chile they accept work as assistants to 'The Barbecue King of Southern America' and pose as leprology experts in order to get their photographs taken for the local newspaper.

There are moments of tr
ue farce and hilarity: camping outdoors in a violent gale, the two travellers wake the next morning to find a house round the very next bend. Ernesto shoots the beloved dog of one of his hosts dead, mistaking its "luminous eyes" for a puma on the loose. Struck with diarrhoea in the middle of the night, he relieves himself out of a window only to discover he's inadvertently covered a large tin roof full of peaches left out to dry in the sun. He gets drunk and flirts a little too much with the wife of a Chilean mechanic, resulting in them being pursued by a dance hall full of irate people. And then there's the grand opening of a Peruvian bell tower, restored with money from Franco's fascist government, and spoilt when the band mistakenly strikes up the Spanish Republican anthem.

There are also the darker moments, foreshadows of the future Che. Questioning the conclusions of eminent archaeologists; ruminating on the inequalities of Chilean health care and an astute analysis of the forthcoming presidential elections; asserting the necessity of dispensing with the "tiresome Yankee"; scenting revolution in police state Colombia, and decrying the fate of copper miners and teachers persecuted for their political beliefs in countries run by strong arm governments that brutalize and corrupt, and "blond, arrogant" multi-nationals of North American, German and British parentage. And what starts as a boyish adventure, a thirst for new horizons and friendly women, slowly morphs into an embryonic pan-Americanism, a lament for people full of "shame and resentment" and, in his sympathy for the indigenous population, the faint stirrings of the man who would later advocate peasant based revolutions throughout the entire continent.

There is much to love in this book, composed of Che's original diaries (rewritten in narrative form long after the original journey), letters home to his parents and a final, clearly

allegorical, scene full of classic Marxist thought on the dictatorship of the proletariat. The translation by Ann Wright holds true to the spirit of the journey, full of earthy language, authentic colour and illuminating footnotes. Yet while the book works as a humorous travelogue, it fails to offer much in the way of real insight into the countries Ernesto and Alberto pass through, perhaps due to the fact that it is a mere one hundred and fifty five pages long. Guevara's enforced one month stay in Miami - after his plane develops a serious fault - is mentioned only in the epilogue written by his father. I sometimes felt like a distant observer, albeit an enthralled one, with a sense of detachment that I didn't feel reading the more involving 'Red Dust' by the Chinese dissident Ma Jian, while some of the political passages grafted on later seem jarring and overly serious.

But this is still a book that demands to be read, a book that gives a human face to an image on a million walls and T-shirts. This is the Che behind the cliché, unplugged from cameras and microphones and machine guns. A young man on the adventure of a lifetime beginning to realise he is on the cusp of greatness.

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"Shoot, you are only going to kill a man."
Reported last words of Che Guevara

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DETAILS

Published by Fourth Estate. ISBN 1857023994.

Available at amazon.co.uk for £5.59.

I also highly recommend John Lee Anderson's epic 'Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life.' It's very long - 832 pages - but extremely easy to read and extraordinarily comprehensive.

'Motorcycle Diaries', or at least the section of the journey Ernesto and Alberto completed on La
Poderosa, was the subject of a one hour documentary by the Canadian director Lawrence Elman entitled 'Tracing Che'.

A Spanish language film version of the book is currently awaiting distibution in the USA.

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