The second book, which follows The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts. Again, a mixture between very silly and very funny and completely horrendous... and just when it is getting really awful and just too real it goes compeletely left-field and fantastical. Definitely worth reading, but not, perhaps late at night. ( )

Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord is a parody, pastiche and example of magical realism in equal measure—the tale of a philosophy professor, Dionisio Vivo, from a country not unlike Colombia, who begins a war of letters in the newspaper editorial pages against a major drug trafficker, and is forced to end it in great violence. This is not a book for the faint-hearted (I'm not joking about the degree of violence) nor is it a book for someone who finds the magical realism genre tiresome (de Bernières avoids it ever being twee, but it is a bold and sometimes buffoonish element of the book, played for laughs and sarcasm), but if you like your novels in uncompromisingly primary colours, you might well enjoy it. It's not my favourite of his books, but I did enjoy it—though having read de Bernières for the first time in a while, since I've started to educate myself a little more about the things which underpin what I read, the fact that it's a white British guy writing a satire set in a Latin American country... I don't know quite how to categorise it, but at times it felt a little—voyeuristic? Is that the right word? There were sections where it felt as if he was almost making another country his playground, and that made for uncomfortable reading. ( )

Louis de Bernieres first novel set in an unidentified country in Latin America . Strongly influenced by Magical Realism very readable and lyrical in parts and extraordinarily and graphically violent in the last few chapters. The contrast between the gently humourous main body of the book and the plainly and coldly told dissection (for lack of a better word) of the main female character while she is still alive but mercifully unconscious towards the end is particularly telling. ( )

When you've read this you know something of the mess that is South America, overrun by alien cultures but struggling to find itself through the Latinization. ( )