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

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

3.5 of 5 stars 3.50 · rating details · 211 ratings · 63 reviews

Rising literary star Deb Olin Unferth offers a new twist on the coming-of-age memoir in this utterly unique and captivating story of the year she ran away from college with her Christian boyfriend and followed him to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas.

Despite their earnest commitment to a myriad of revolutionary causes and to each other, the couple find themselves unwanted,...more

Hardcover, 216 pages

Published February 1st 2011 by Henry Holt and Co. (first published January 22nd 2011)

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Wesleyan Books

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2012 National Book Critics Circle Awards Finalists for Autobiography and Biography

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Jan 04, 2012 oriana rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-2011, the-new-new-new-new-thing

I LOVE Deb Olin Unferth. I want this book RIGHT NOW.

***

OMIGOD THE BOOK GODS ANSWERED ME. I won the GR giveaway for this, holy shit!!!

***

This review was originally written for CCLaP, and the book was also on my CCLaP best-of-2011 list

"Nineteen eighty-seven is the year I did nothing. The year I fought in no war, contributed to no cause, didn't get shot, jailed, or inured. We didn't starve, didn't die, didn't save anyone either. Didn't change anyone's mind for the better, or the worse. We had absol...more I LOVE Deb Olin Unferth. I want this book RIGHT NOW.

***

OMIGOD THE BOOK GODS ANSWERED ME. I won the GR giveaway for this, holy shit!!!

***

This review was originally written for CCLaP, and the book was also on my CCLaP best-of-2011 list

"Nineteen eighty-seven is the year I did nothing. The year I fought in no war, contributed to no cause, didn't get shot, jailed, or inured. We didn't starve, didn't die, didn't save anyone either. Didn't change anyone's mind for the better, or the worse. We had absolutely no effect on anything that happened. The only thing that changed as a result of our presence was us."

A quick synopsis: Deb and her boyfriend George leave college in 1987, when she is eighteen and he is twenty, to spend a year traveling through Central America--Mexico, Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama--in search of revolutions to foment, or at least "revolution jobs" to procure. Along the way, they work in an orphanage in teaching the children reading and sports, until they are asked to leave. They build bicycles in Nicaragua for a few days before being fired for incompetence. They trade off bouts of diarrhea and fevers and scabies, get robbed over and over, have animated political and philosophical discussions with other Internacionalistas (called Sandalistas by the locals), conduct and record interviews with anyone who will speak with them (though they later lose all the tapes), keep meticulous journals, bicker and make up and fight again, and generally botch everything they set out to do meaningfully.

There is plenty of firsthand history here, as she moves from country to country, revolution to revolution. She teaches us about guerillas who have been successful, soldiers and how they interrogate, spies and their disguises, priests who renounced religion in favor of politics, the way that the things she experienced, in retrospect, wound up playing out on the international stage. But the book is also suffused with the unreliability of memory. Unferth is constantly cancelling out her stories by questioning whether they really happened just then, or there, or in that way. She describes a family trip to El Salvador many years earlier, listing all the awful things that happened, and what a terrible memory it was. Then she says that her mother remembers it as a wonderful time. She tells us that she and George were in Managua when the radical newspaper La Prensa reopened, detailing the crowds, the paperboys, the cheering. But then she backtracks--were they really in Managua that day? Were there really such crowds? Was that the same day they saw the Russian ballet, or the day she cut the soldier's hair? Was La Prensa really even closed? This honesty and confusion is, to me, a welcome and unique stance in our current over-saturated memoir world, to admit that we are fallible, that memory is a trap and a lie. Memoirists always seem so sure of themselves, so certain of who said what to whom and where and when, and it is refreshing to see Unferth questioning and questioning. It makes the rest of her story less iron-clad, true, but also more human, more relatable.

And her language! Beautiful and strange, like everything she writes. "She had the face of captive royalty, the voice of something gentle in a cage." "I hated him with the freshness of wet cement, a new imprint, a hand coming down on my mind and marking it." "The sun was like another language. The sun was like a shout in the sky." Her prose is generally straightforward and sparse, getting out of the way of the story, but sprinkled with moments of beauty, with profound realizations, with sharp and acute characterizations. It makes for extremely engaging, propelling reading.

Starting even with its subtitle, "The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War," Revolution is told in a particular tone, one of amused disbelief in one's former self. It's easy to picture Unferth tapping this out, shaking her head and rolling her eyes--was that really me doing all those ridiculous things? Though there are a few times when this façade is cracked, and she lets real emotions come through, the bulk of the book is extremely self-conscious. She keeps askance of the narrative, condescending to it, to her former naïve self and her bizarre genius boyfriend and all the self-important buffoons they met along the way. "Imagine. We were walking across their war, juggling. We were bringing guitars, plays adapted from Gogol, elephants wearing tasseled hats. The Nicaraguans wanted land, literacy, a decent doctor. We wanted a nice sing-a-long and a ballet. We weren't a revolution. We were an armed circus." This tone choice is clearly a defense mechanism, forestalling criticism via self-mockery, and it is a successful technique, to a point. It grounds the narrative, saving it from corny idealism and keeping it from spinning off into maudlin recollection or inflated self-importance. But ultimately there is such a bemused, disapproving distance that the reader too is forced most of the time into their own jaded head-shaking disbelief, rather than finding a way to embrace the person she was, living the life she chose. Nonetheless, Revolution still manages to be a powerful book. It's ultimately an incredible journey she took, full of insane things she did, and Unferth's language and narration is more than up to the task.(less)

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Aug 06, 2011 Micah rated it 1 of 5 stars

I wanted to like this book. Really, I did. When I first read about it, I could see myself in the author's shoes: if I was 20-something 20 years ago, I could see myself doing what she did, running off to Central America to bear witness to the conflicts that were raging there between leftist guerrillas and right-wing governments propped up by the United States without a real understanding of the gravity of the conflict. I liked the idea that Unferth was turning a critical lens on herself as a youn...more I wanted to like this book. Really, I did. When I first read about it, I could see myself in the author's shoes: if I was 20-something 20 years ago, I could see myself doing what she did, running off to Central America to bear witness to the conflicts that were raging there between leftist guerrillas and right-wing governments propped up by the United States without a real understanding of the gravity of the conflict. I liked the idea that Unferth was turning a critical lens on herself as a young idealistic kid who didn't really know shit about what was happening in Central America–and, in the course of the book, seems to realize that the more she learned about the conflict, the less place she really had being there. The selection I read in Harper's also made me think I would really enjoy the book's snarky, self-mocking tone. All pieces seemed to fit together to make an enjoyable reading experience.

But God, I did not enjoy reading this book.

Most annoying about the book is Unferth's tone and style, which become insufferable after the first 10 pages or so. She writes in very short, simple sentences that are supposed to reflect her naivete at the time she was in El Salvador. It's a clever idea in theory, but it became impossible to enjoy quite rapidly.

Aside from the style, there doesn't seem to be much of a tale to tell here–at least not a book-length one. Naive girl and naive/stupid boy head to civil war in impoverished country to support the revolution; don't contribute much, but, in their naivete, think they fall in love; girl eventually realizes she's not in love and boy is a moron; girl goes home, having grown considerably more than boy, who remains an idiot. That should've been told in a 30-page story, not a 200-page book. So much of the details feel like filler; the development of the plot seems slow as molasses, and it's fairly clear early on where it's going to go (which makes continuing to read a grueling exercise).

Also, maybe I think this because I'm young and naive, but one of Unferth's final conclusions seems to be that she never should've gone to El Salvador; that the entire endeavor was an exercise in foolishness. I don't think this is the case. I would have liked to read a narrative with a clear-headed analysis of some of the foible and folly of young privileged Americans heading down to Latin America in the middle of a brutal conflict, but also some of the things gained from such a trip. I got the sense that Unferth had gone from bright-eyed idealist to cynical hipster who thinks trying to change the world or supporting those who are changing the world is an exercise in futility. I disagree.

Unferth seems to have a rich story to tell here. But the way she tells it alone makes it impossible to enjoy. Her thick cynicism makes the conclusions one could draw from her story dubious. (less)

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Apr 06, 2012 Carole rated it 3 of 5 stars

In 1987 Deb and her boyfriend George decide that their main ambition was to help the revolution, they had wanted to go to Cuba but didn't know how to get there as it was illegal.

George didn't believe in paying bills, it was a principle with him, corporations were evil and rich, he didn't care about money, possessions, sleep or food....Deb found this attractive and thought he was a genius....thus she followed him around South America even though she hated it -

I saw suddenly that this was all a g...more

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Jul 23, 2011 Rachel rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography

The compelling, if disjointed, memoir of a 17 year old college girl in the 1987 who runs away with her Christian boyfriend to join "the revolution" in several Central American countries. What unfolds is the adventure story you'd expect from a couple of impulsive college students who want to be part of something but pretty much fail at it (they get fired from all their revolution jobs within a couple of weeks). At least they're in good company with all the other revolution tourists, or "Sandalist...more

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Mar 29, 2011 Alaina rated it 4 of 5 stars

Deb Olin Unferth’s Revolution: The Year I Fell In Love And Went To Join The War, did a lot of the things that I like to see writing do – particularly in the realm of point of view and character construction. While this is a memoir, it reads more like a novel so I’m going to discuss it as if it were. The point of view we see here is what one of my past instructors called a double I. This means that there are essentially two “speakers” who tell the story: the “I of the now” who heavily moderates...more Deb Olin Unferth’s Revolution: The Year I Fell In Love And Went To Join The War, did a lot of the things that I like to see writing do – particularly in the realm of point of view and character construction. While this is a memoir, it reads more like a novel so I’m going to discuss it as if it were. The point of view we see here is what one of my past instructors called a double I. This means that there are essentially two “speakers” who tell the story: the “I of the now” who heavily moderates the story being told by the “I of the then.” The “I of the now” is the voice who is writing the story and the “I of the then” is the voice to whom the actions are happening in that I’s dramatic present. This is a very common technique for memoirs and fiction alike as it allows reflection and interpretation of events to be included in the story which would not have been possible in a single I construction which would be limited to the actions and impressions of that moment. Readers tend to like that level of interpretation and –self-analysis that happens. The governing “I of the then” makes itself known in flashes; for example, in the chapter titled Love this sentence appears: “The truth is I had (have) a dread of being left.” Another example of this appears in the chapter titled Early Writings, where she discusses her journals. Both the narrator and George kept journals throughout their time in Central America. She says, “I don’t recognize the person who wrote those journals. She sounds like she’s quoting someone or practicing what she wants to say, lifting phrases from another’s tongue – George’s, presumably. I get exasperated with her, furious. I want to reach through the murk and shake her, but then another voice steps into my mind and defends her. ‘She’s trying to figure it out,’ this other me inside me says. ‘Be patient with her.’” Here we see the clash of that past self and her perceptions and words and the woman reading them later – after the choices have been made and some new degree of independence attained.
I, personally, despised George more or less from the get-go; however, my dislike of him is overshadowed by how well he (as well as the other characters in the novel) are developed. The chapter titled Typical Man is where George’s character is largely developed and the reader can see him both as a naïve young adult who thinks he is far more worldly than he is, as well as a humorous, quirky revolutionary – both of which are attractive and repellant (in characters, so to speak) simultaneously. The narrators only explanation for him is: “…he was just a typical guy in a typical place, and he made choices, and each choice changed him, and each change began to close off other possibilities, seal shut other rooms, exclude other people he might have become, one by one, until he could no longer be anything but what he was.” The “I of the now” governs this description of him, whereas prior to this the “I of the then” had been governing his description and as such had been granting him a degree of rose-tinted pleasantness. All of the characters are memorable in some way, and Unferth has a talent for presenting a few details that beautifully and dynamically capture the essence of the character, even though most of the tangential characters are only present for brief periods of time.
(less)

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Feb 15, 2011 Daveski rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

Last year, I read Unferth's first novel Vacation, which I thought featured fantastic writing but left me feeling a little flat on the characters and story. This book, even though it's non-fiction, takes basically everything I loved about her novel and adds some emotional depth that was sorely needed. I don't know, maybe it's just easier to add emotion when you're writing about your own experiences, but I also think that the detached tone of Vacation was intentional, and I'm glad to see that it's...more

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Mar 12, 2011 Mary (BookHounds) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, from-publisher-author

Picture yourself 18 years old, a freshman in college and on your own for the first time in your life. With your first taste of freedom, you fall for the wrong boy and run off to South America because he thinks it is a good idea. Deb Olin Unferth does exactly this. I kept asking myself, why would anyone do this? Well, Deb answers like a typical unsure 18 year old with this memoir. There are some seriously funny moments in this book, but I was a bit frustrates in a couple of stories where they jus...more

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Mar 02, 2011 Rebecca H. rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: bio-autobio

I’ve had very good luck with nonfiction so far this year, including Sarah Bakewell’s biography of Montaigne, Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story, Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed, and now Deb Olin Unferth’s book Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War. I loved every moment of this all-too-short book (a very fast 200 pages). It’s exactly what a memoir should be: entertaining, thoughtful, smart, funny, self-reflective, and even self-critical, with exact...more

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Jun 26, 2011 Jamie Bradway rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: ebook, nook

I'm wavering between 3 and 4 for Revolution. This is the second time I have to say that Unferth is a great writer - her pacing, her voice, her spare originality - but she skimps on plot and characterization. This might not be as fair a charge against a memoir, but she kind of left me dog-paddling about in a vast sea of nicely constructed sentences for the middle third of the book. It could be that this feeling was intentional, a mirroring of Deb and George's meanderings, but it's also a good way...more

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Mar 04, 2013 Frederic Germay rated it 4 of 5 stars

TheRumpus.net has this neat little ditty you can sign up for called Letters in the Mail. A couple times every month, you'll get letters containing personal stories and/or anecdotes from various authors and writers. Occasionally, a return address will be listed should one elect to reply. For several months, I enjoyed these letters but never really felt compelled to reply. Finally, one letter came along that personally touched me. I can't even remember what it was about, but it was the first lette...more TheRumpus.net has this neat little ditty you can sign up for called Letters in the Mail. A couple times every month, you'll get letters containing personal stories and/or anecdotes from various authors and writers. Occasionally, a return address will be listed should one elect to reply. For several months, I enjoyed these letters but never really felt compelled to reply. Finally, one letter came along that personally touched me. I can't even remember what it was about, but it was the first letter I responded to, a letter that I 'needed' to respond to. That was my introduction to Deb Olin Unferth.

I wrote to her about some blah-blah-nobody-cares stuff and she eventually responded, mailing me a copy of her book, a story that tells her coming of age tale in all of its stupid glory. She thought it might help with my situation, you know, to see familiar feelings from an outside perspective. Naturally, I was skeptical of that, but I finally got around to reading it anyway. It was a free book. No complaints here.

Having just finished it, I am astonished. This has been a quality read. It started out a little slow-paced, but most autobiographical tales often do. Once you become invested in these stories, they have a way of grabbing you by the necktie and tugging you through the pages into the author's life, and you cry with them and laugh with them, saying you would've known better, but knowing that you wouldn't have.

Unferth details her defining quest to several Central American countries to help The Sandinistas and their communist revolution, at least - that was the plan. They never really accomplish much of what they set out to do, and expectations fall apart and people reveal their true colors...the glorified start to show their flaws with wear and the voiceless meek begin to discover their own special power. It sounds corny, I'll bet. But it's good.

The centerpiece of this novel lies with her boyfriend George, a supremely confident and charismatic Christian, a young man who draws people to him with his indefinable energy and his expansive personality, big enough for two - so why bother with another. She's the one that follows him into his helltastic void, not because she's particularly political or religious, but because she needs a purpose, and so his desires and ambitions become hers. These wee damsel types always irk me in the movies, perhaps because they remind me of myself. It's that legendary line in On the Road, "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to be saved..." And so forth.

Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love tracks the author's journey from tagging along in the shadows of great idea-men to breaking away and flowering into something unsure and new, something like blind hands feeling out the world, something not better or worse but finally honest. Something like self-discovery.(less)

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Feb 04, 2011 Rachel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads, memoir, nonfiction, owned

Never, never have I read a memoir that was so clear-headed and bluntly honest. In the late 80s, Deb Olin Unferth fell for a Christian boy, converted, dropped out of college, and ran away with him to join the revolutionaries in Central America. The trip did not go quite as she planned. Unferth's gorgeous, dryly humorous prose is almost ferocious in its dedication to exposing the truest account of Unferth's experiences possible-- she discusses how dependent she was on her boyfriend, how irritated...more

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Jan 28, 2013 Stephani Meyers rated it 1 of 5 stars

Literally THE worst book I have ever read. Stop while you are ahead. Kept getting worse and worse. No one edited this at all. I've never seen such a horribly written book. Plus, there was no story details to even keep things interesting. I still don't know what the fuck revolution she went to find. Horrible.

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Feb 17, 2011 Zoë (In The Next Room) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: review-copy, memoir-biography

Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War by Deb Olin Unferth is a memoir most easily summarized by an excerpt from the book itself:

"My boyfriend and I went to join the revolution.
We couldn’t find the first revolution.
The second revolution hired us on and then let us go.
We went to the other revolutions in the area- there were several- but every one we came to let us hang around for a few weeks but then made us leave.
We ran out of money and at last we came home.
I was eigh...more Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War by Deb Olin Unferth is a memoir most easily summarized by an excerpt from the book itself:

"My boyfriend and I went to join the revolution.
We couldn’t find the first revolution.
The second revolution hired us on and then let us go.
We went to the other revolutions in the area- there were several- but every one we came to let us hang around for a few weeks but then made us leave.
We ran out of money and at last we came home.
I was eighteen. That’s the whole story."

Focusing on the year 1987, the memoir is told in a voice that is part naive 18 year old, desperately following her boyfriend wherever he goes, and part wise woman reflecting on her youthful experiences. Revolution is told in short chapters, fluttering throughout time, beginning with Unferth and her boyfriend, George, returning from Central America, with Unferth desperately craving McDonalds, "I had food in my heart and mind that morning", she writes. Later in the memoir when their Nicaraguan visas run out they go to Costa Rica. At this point they are both extremely malnourished and Unferth has taken on the look of a pregnant woman due to some kind of parasite likely living in her stomach, inflating it round and smooth. They purchase chocolate cake and Diet Coke and with a full mouth, Unferth states "Capitalism is wonderful."

Revolution manages to be both funny and heart-warming, told with a dry sense of humour and a remarkable openness. Unferth easily admits that she was so in love with George, a desperate young love, that she was willing to drop out of college and follow him into dangerous places, deciding to be Christian along the way. Her family was Jewish and her decision to abandon their religion was perhaps more disturbing to them then that fact that she had left home and written them from the Mexican border about her plans to find a revolution. Unfortunately, finding a revolution proves more difficult than George and her imagined. They get fired from an orphanage when Unferth refuses to wear a bra and instead travel around Central America with a tape recorder, interviewing various people and recording over old rock cassettes. Unferth seems incredibly unaware of the danger she is encountering, more concerned about whether or not she should marry George. Writing on her experiences with the revolution, she says:

"We had absolutely no effect on anything that happened. The only thing that changed as a result of our presence was us."

Unferth's writing is incredible, she has an eye for tiny details and description which are what make Revolution so memorable. Her writing is both quirky and profound, and she manages to find a touch of humour in all situations. For example, she writes that benefit of having this parasite that inflated her stomach was that people often thought she was pregnant and she was not beyond using that to get food. Unferth also delves into what happened to her and George afterwards, including how she hired a private detective to find him, supposedly because she was writing this book but she was possibly writing this book as an excuse to find out what had happened to him. It is a remarkably genuine story of her first true love and the desperate obsession that comes along with it.

In addition to the strength of the content itself, this may sound a bit silly, but this is also a case where the physical book is really gorgeous. I think the cover is perfect and the memoir is divided into sections separated by text in a style similar to the cover, including tiny butterflies.

Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War was my first experience with author Deb Olin Unferth, who has previously published a collection of short stories, Minor Robberies, as well as a novel, Vacation, however I have already purchased her previous works and am extremely excited to read them as she is clearly a rising literary star. Unferth has an incredible ability to be concise and clever, the book itself is a fairly short read, but what sticks with the reader afterwards is the power of the writing. In Revolution, Unferth reflects on her experiences attempting to join Central America revolutions with an observant and humorous eye while writing about universal emotions and the distances we will go, literally, for love. (less)

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Jun 08, 2011 cat rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 100-in-2011

2011 Book 66/100

I would give this a 3.5 stars if that were possible, if only for the paragraph on page 107 that begins "I took my dress off and walked around in my underwear." and that asserts "My coming of age story, if I had one, would be right here. It didn't involve a loss of innocence or man's inhumanity to man. It was me taking my clothes off and marching in a circle around the room. Somehow I knew - nothing specific, I just knew - I wasn't who I would be. More of me was coming." Which so...more

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Jun 13, 2011 Stephanie Baker rated it 2 of 5 stars

The time and place of this book is compelling (1987 during the increasing struggle between revolution and dictatorship in Central and South America), but the biographical aspect was completely uninspiring. While I hoped to read about the affect of revolutionary momentum on an idealistic American girl who hoped to be part of the change, instead I found a whiny account of an eighteen year old dealing with boyfriend troubles and diarrhea. Written in her adult life, the author still shows no sign of...more

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Mar 29, 2011 Maria rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: bookpleasures-com

When Deb Olin Unferth was 18, she fell in love with George, a fellow student, who was rather rebellious, and bit strange. Being in love, it seemed young Deb would do anything for her boyfriend. She changed her religion from Jewish to Christian, to her family’s dismay, and followed George on his journey to ‘foment’ the revolution in Central America.

The naiveté of youth leads Deb to somewhere she is totally unprepared for, and the often treacherous journey to Nicaragua leaves an impression on her...more

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Apr 18, 2011 Jason Boog rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nice-thing-book-reviews

Memoir with an impossible-to-describe but perfectly pitched voice, will remind everybody what it is like to be 18-years-old and lost.

Quote: "One morning I looked out the window and a huge tank stood in front of our house. It took up the whole street. So the FMLN ran away and the army moved in. They put a missile launcher in the window and my mother dusted it every day. ‘Mom,’ I said, ‘stop dusting that thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s dusty.’ Still, she dusted. And she tidied. All day she went...more

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Jan 06, 2013 Danny Fritz rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: top-secret-book-club

This book was hard to finish. The writing is just so bad.

At one point, there was a page without a single period on it. There was no congruence of stories. And after finishing it, it is hard to tell what happened in it at all.

I'm not positive what "the revolution" she always spoke of was. I'm not positive what they did at all in Central America in fact. She spends a great deal talking about her boyfriend George. She also goes a great deal into stalking George. All stuff that is horribly uninteres...more

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Mar 26, 2011 Lindsey added it

Shelves: new-female-texts

This book is less a memoir about being in Central America during the 1980s and more about the author remembering being a 19 year old in a bad relationship while in Central America during the 1980s. I doubt many people remember their 19 year old selves fondly and this definitely comes through. An interesting book, but the two main characters are pretty annoying, again probably because the author doesn't remember them fondly. I really enjoyed the last quarter of the book when she begins discussing...more

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Apr 11, 2012 Ellen Johnson rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir

Reminded me of my early 20s, when I backpacked around Europe on my own for 10 weeks with very little money, and of my mid-twenties, when I worked for the Immigration Service at the Miami airport a couple of years before Unferth went to Central America. She expresses the pathos with a dry wit. both a sad and funny book. Every day at my job I saw people fleeing the violence and oppression that the US was backing in those countries, but we wouldn't allow them political asylum because they weren't f...more

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Oct 12, 2011 Jess rated it 1 of 5 stars

I feel like I need to write something so people will know that it is not just because of the bad politics that I dislike this book. The narrator's lack of honesty/openness about her change process over time, masked by shallow reflections that deny the feelings she felt at the time in favor of a somewhat cryptically world-weary reflective voice. It's a lot like Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius but the actual content is less compelling, and the voice less funny.

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Feb 23, 2013 Jonathan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Another book that I loved the self-aware tone and biting writing. And yet, this book pissed me off. It was so self-absorbed that it missed any sense of social change, idealism or that change is possible. It left me with a sense of helplessness and paralysis that was unwanted.

The distinctive voice and journey through Central American revolutions was charming and captivating.

I wanted to argue with her that she missed so much in her aimless wandering!

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Feb 03, 2011 Nina rated it 5 of 5 stars

Unferth captures the innocence and freshness of the idealistic girl who quit college and ran away with her boyfriend to join whichever revolution they could find. Her memoir of spending 1987 in Central America is laugh-out-loud funny on the surface, yet infused with the chaos and turbulence that marked the Sandinistas. Unferth is a gifted writer whose words flow seamlessly. Her droll account is equal parts memoir, travelogue, social, political, cultural context, and coming-of-age.

Although my rev...more

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Nov 29, 2011 camilla rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-2011

I loved the whole premise of this book, writer running away with her boyfriend to central america to join the revolution in the 1980's. And while a lot of it was really interesting and relateable, ultimately it felt too disjointed and disorienting. I wish the author wouldn't question her memory so much, did he leave or did he stay or am i imagining this memory? Just craft the memory as best you can and roll with it. Also, by the end I just felt exhausted and sort of sad. Did she even enjoy any o...more

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Mar 22, 2011 Erin rated it 2 of 5 stars

This was my work's March 2011 book club selection, since we had been reading a lot of "dark" stuff lately and wanted something more upbeat and comical.

It was funny (at times), but it wasn't what I expected. I thought more of the plot would focus on Unferth's experiences living in war-ridden Central America during the 80s, but that served more as a backdrop to her ruminations about her relationship with her beau at the time.

The book was definitely a quick read--I got through it in just about 4...more

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Dec 16, 2012 Michael Andersen-Andrade rated it 3 of 5 stars

I debated whether to give this book two stars or three. If I could I'd give it two and a half stars. It's full of promise but it's like a first draft in desperate need of several rewrites and a good editor. At times I got annoyed at the sloppiness and incompleteness of some of the writing. However, as someone who has lived a very similar experience in Latin America, I was also able to relate to parts of it.

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Sep 26, 2011 Devin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, central-america

Beautifully rendered memoir. Insightful on the concept of memory, reminding us how little of it there is. And of that little how much of it is wrong. The memories that do remain have to do a lot of work. Author engages with "missing" memories, and with the whole set of experiences surrounding her trip with a boyfriend to find revolution in Central America, in a refreshingly direct and non-judgmental way.

Unferth reveals the details of the journey with stoic prose. Emotions emerge through the cra...more

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May 08, 2011 Natalia rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads, own, 2011

The whole time I was reading this book, I was wondering if it could possibly be true. Unfirth and her boyfriend tool around Central America getting sick, playing at being revolutionaries, and mostly just going nowhere. I simply can't imagine leaving behind my family, my life, my education, my ambitions, everything to chase some kind of poorly-defined mirage of revolution.

The writing style is very stream-of-consciousness. It's pretty and melodious, but conversational. After about a quarter of the...more

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Apr 16, 2012 Lauren rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bios-memoirs

Expected more from this, but still an interesting read. Much more about an internal revolution and the "coming of age" of the author than about her time in Central America "fighting" for the Sandinistas. Kudos to the author for laying it all out there though... she didn't hesitate to show just how shallow and co-dependent she was at age 19.

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Apr 01, 2013 Ben Richmond rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: female-authors, real-life-man, well-styled

Deb Olin Unferth continues to be one my favorite contemporary authors. This book revolves around a fading romance but never veers into sappiness. It's about Communism and Capitalism in Central America but never lectures. It's funny and sad and probably totally misrepresented by this review in every way except one: it's a great book.

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About Deb Olin Unferth

American short-story writer and novelist. She is the author of a collection of stories, Minor Robberies, and a novel, Vacation, both published by McSweeney's.

Her stories have appeared in Harper's, Fence, AGNI and other magazines. She is a frequent contributor to Noon. In 2009 she received a Creative Capital Grant from the Warhol Foundation and was also the recipient of the Cabell First Novelist Aw...more

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Books by Deb Olin Unferth

One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box: Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, How the Water Feels to the Fishes, and Minor Robberies

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title link	preview: Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8633231-revolution?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1317066248l/8633231.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8633231-revolution?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War by Deb Olin Unferth[/url]

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

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