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The Geography of Desire
Reminiscent of Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer , The Geography of Desire is a mesmerizing tale of political intrigue, eroticism, repression, and murder in a mysterious Central American country.
- GenresFiction
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
About the author
Robert Boswell
65 books50 followersRobert Boswell is the author of eleven books, including The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, a story collection with Graywolf Press, in April 2009. His novels: Century's Son, American Owned Love, Mystery Ride, The Geography of Desire, and Crooked Hearts. His other story collections: Living to Be 100 and Dancing in the Movies. His nonfiction: The Half-Known World, a book on the craft of writing, and What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak, a book about a real-life treasure hunt in New Mexico (co-written with David Schweidel). His cyberpunk novel Virtual Death (published under the pseudonym Shale Aaron) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award.
His play Tongues won the John Gassner Prize. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Best Stories from the South, Esquire, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Colorado Review, and many other magazines.
He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson.
His play Tongues won the John Gassner Prize. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Best Stories from the South, Esquire, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Colorado Review, and many other magazines.
He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
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March 1, 2014The description on the back is better than anything I encountered in the first 50 pages of the book, so I quit.
I mean... white guy goes to Central America, gets laid, omg, so deep. Not enough literature like THAT in the Western canon. Bleh.
I mean... white guy goes to Central America, gets laid, omg, so deep. Not enough literature like THAT in the Western canon. Bleh.
August 22, 2011
Here is my original reviewed published in the San Francisco Chronicle in November 1989:
Robert Boswell's sturdy, competent, gutsy ''The Geography of Desire'' tells the story of an irritating norteamericano self-exiled in a fictional Central American country with the murder and repression we've come to expect of that region.
Leon Green, blond and green-eyed, manages a hotel in the isolated coastal resort town of La Boca and sleeps regularly with two women. He has left California behind, hoping that if he can reinvent himself in a new life, he can become a good person. His criteria are not unattainably stringent; all he wants is to avoid living a lie.
''Only after his second marriage failed did he understand that he would have to separate himself from the mass of others to find happiness, to escape loneliness, to discover the true shape of his desire,'' Boswell writes, echoing the excellent title of this book, ''which was what he'd done in coming to La Boca.''
Boswell seems almost embarrassed to be asking that Leon be taken seriously. He's a character who ''liked to pretend the past had never happened.'' He says: ''I've thought a lot about love and happiness and sadness and all that.''
About the time things should start to happen with Leon, the story fans out to concentrate on other characters. It seems La Bocans are used as surrogates to make points about Leon. Pilar, the beautiful Communist-in-hiding who runs the only bookstore in town, looks at a Canadian man leaning against the hood of a bus and finds herself ''wondering at the power of distance to change perception.'' Benjamin, the son of Ramon, a fisherman who likes to tell stories, also muses: ''His father claimed his grandfather had died of despair, and Benjamin wondered if that were possible, to die from losing hope.'' Maria Peralta Cardenas, Pilar's mother, ''had mastered the ability to impersonate her own feelings.''
These peripheral characters seem more compelling than Leon. Ramon, torn between the dream of sending his son to college and his shame at ripping off the gringo tourists, is sympathetic and emblematic. Samuel, a dying revolutionary nursed by Pilar, tries to answer questions about the existence of God. But he remembers the day he was fishing and a human hair coiled around a hook led him and his brother to discover several bodies that had been mutilated by death squads.
As the story progresses, Ramon tries to persuade Leon to give up the younger of his two lovers, a teenager named Lourdes. Ramon thinks Leon should marry Pilar and leave Lourdes to Benjamin, who will need Lourdes at his side if he is to succeed as a university student. Leon doesn't want to lose his friend, whose rambling but artful stories he enjoys, but he also doesn't want to lose his lover.
Boswell gives Leon the boozy diffidence of a Raymond Carver character, but by moving the setting of the story, he transforms the reader's response to him. In a Carver story the characters grapple with moral struggles of modest, human scale. But Leon has higher pretensions. He struggles for moral hygiene without seeing that his attitude, not his theories, needs the work.
''Birds had nothing going for them if they were denied flight,'' Leon muses as he stares at a crippled bird. ''He felt the same about stupid people. What advantages did humans have except intelligence? Their bodies were soft and vulnerable to the elements. They didn't run that fast or swim that well, and they certainly couldn't fly. They were prone to a vague and constant discontent that they'd manufactured thousands of words to describe, but that Leon thought of simply as loneliness.''
The writing is fine, but the suggestion can't be ignored that Leon thinks of himself as having some great powers of lucidity and insight that make him different from the dullards he sees around him. Throughout the book, he struggles with questions that have obvious answers. He wants to understand why he felt compelled to sleep with his second wife while he was still married to his first, and his first wife while he was married to his second. He lulls himself into a kind of trance with the dubious belief that an idea can explain what sounds pretty explicable already.
When Maria Peralta, a palm reader, sees Leon's handprint, Boswell writes, ''Finally, she raised her head. 'He sincerely wants to be good,' she told her friend. Then she added, 'That is often the most dangerous kind of person.' ''
Robert Boswell's sturdy, competent, gutsy ''The Geography of Desire'' tells the story of an irritating norteamericano self-exiled in a fictional Central American country with the murder and repression we've come to expect of that region.
Leon Green, blond and green-eyed, manages a hotel in the isolated coastal resort town of La Boca and sleeps regularly with two women. He has left California behind, hoping that if he can reinvent himself in a new life, he can become a good person. His criteria are not unattainably stringent; all he wants is to avoid living a lie.
''Only after his second marriage failed did he understand that he would have to separate himself from the mass of others to find happiness, to escape loneliness, to discover the true shape of his desire,'' Boswell writes, echoing the excellent title of this book, ''which was what he'd done in coming to La Boca.''
Boswell seems almost embarrassed to be asking that Leon be taken seriously. He's a character who ''liked to pretend the past had never happened.'' He says: ''I've thought a lot about love and happiness and sadness and all that.''
About the time things should start to happen with Leon, the story fans out to concentrate on other characters. It seems La Bocans are used as surrogates to make points about Leon. Pilar, the beautiful Communist-in-hiding who runs the only bookstore in town, looks at a Canadian man leaning against the hood of a bus and finds herself ''wondering at the power of distance to change perception.'' Benjamin, the son of Ramon, a fisherman who likes to tell stories, also muses: ''His father claimed his grandfather had died of despair, and Benjamin wondered if that were possible, to die from losing hope.'' Maria Peralta Cardenas, Pilar's mother, ''had mastered the ability to impersonate her own feelings.''
These peripheral characters seem more compelling than Leon. Ramon, torn between the dream of sending his son to college and his shame at ripping off the gringo tourists, is sympathetic and emblematic. Samuel, a dying revolutionary nursed by Pilar, tries to answer questions about the existence of God. But he remembers the day he was fishing and a human hair coiled around a hook led him and his brother to discover several bodies that had been mutilated by death squads.
As the story progresses, Ramon tries to persuade Leon to give up the younger of his two lovers, a teenager named Lourdes. Ramon thinks Leon should marry Pilar and leave Lourdes to Benjamin, who will need Lourdes at his side if he is to succeed as a university student. Leon doesn't want to lose his friend, whose rambling but artful stories he enjoys, but he also doesn't want to lose his lover.
Boswell gives Leon the boozy diffidence of a Raymond Carver character, but by moving the setting of the story, he transforms the reader's response to him. In a Carver story the characters grapple with moral struggles of modest, human scale. But Leon has higher pretensions. He struggles for moral hygiene without seeing that his attitude, not his theories, needs the work.
''Birds had nothing going for them if they were denied flight,'' Leon muses as he stares at a crippled bird. ''He felt the same about stupid people. What advantages did humans have except intelligence? Their bodies were soft and vulnerable to the elements. They didn't run that fast or swim that well, and they certainly couldn't fly. They were prone to a vague and constant discontent that they'd manufactured thousands of words to describe, but that Leon thought of simply as loneliness.''
The writing is fine, but the suggestion can't be ignored that Leon thinks of himself as having some great powers of lucidity and insight that make him different from the dullards he sees around him. Throughout the book, he struggles with questions that have obvious answers. He wants to understand why he felt compelled to sleep with his second wife while he was still married to his first, and his first wife while he was married to his second. He lulls himself into a kind of trance with the dubious belief that an idea can explain what sounds pretty explicable already.
When Maria Peralta, a palm reader, sees Leon's handprint, Boswell writes, ''Finally, she raised her head. 'He sincerely wants to be good,' she told her friend. Then she added, 'That is often the most dangerous kind of person.' ''
April 23, 2015
The book starts off sleepy and slow but pleasant, like a vaguely political travel novel about some country in Central America. It makes one feel wistful about tropical beaches and beautiful women and vague revolutionary ideologies, but the last 100 pages move by rapidly in a blur. This book is apt to the title, it spares nothing in the exploration of desire and the contradictory nature of desire and love. It is a book that should be on the required reading list of any young man, because it delves into, what from my perspective at least, is the secret fear of all young men, to make oneself vulnerable enough to another to love truly and completely. Leon, the main character, essentially has to be destroyed and reborn in order to pass the test and become that kind of vulnerability.
I usually know it is a good book, a moving one, if it brings tears to my eyes or makes me feel some other emotion so completely that I feel that I know the character, that the character is one of my character, a version of me that I prance around in in my daylight life. When Leon realizes he missed his only chance to love Pilar I had that sensation. Its the thought that has been reverberating in my head for months now, replacing the old bitter thought that seems to be the go to plan of some of my contemporaries who find themselves washed up on the shores of thirty something unloved and possibly unwanted by anyone. Last year I thought I hate the idea of love, its deceptions and false promises, this year I see myself in this character and his realization and it begs the, what seems to me the most important question in life (I've always been a romantic and when I have tried to make career or money seem most important because, well, it seems easy, for the people who do it, they don't risk anything emotionally, but then, they seem like corpses at times, a deadly kind of boring) which is what are you willing to risk for love? Which really means what are you willing to risk to live?
If the life you live is the question you are asking then I hope that I, like the novelest Robert Boswell in this novel, will be asking that question and that at the end of my life I will have been brave enough to answer: everything.
I usually know it is a good book, a moving one, if it brings tears to my eyes or makes me feel some other emotion so completely that I feel that I know the character, that the character is one of my character, a version of me that I prance around in in my daylight life. When Leon realizes he missed his only chance to love Pilar I had that sensation. Its the thought that has been reverberating in my head for months now, replacing the old bitter thought that seems to be the go to plan of some of my contemporaries who find themselves washed up on the shores of thirty something unloved and possibly unwanted by anyone. Last year I thought I hate the idea of love, its deceptions and false promises, this year I see myself in this character and his realization and it begs the, what seems to me the most important question in life (I've always been a romantic and when I have tried to make career or money seem most important because, well, it seems easy, for the people who do it, they don't risk anything emotionally, but then, they seem like corpses at times, a deadly kind of boring) which is what are you willing to risk for love? Which really means what are you willing to risk to live?
If the life you live is the question you are asking then I hope that I, like the novelest Robert Boswell in this novel, will be asking that question and that at the end of my life I will have been brave enough to answer: everything.
September 24, 2014
A love-triangle type story which takes place in South America. Interesting characters and plot twists abound. The hotel owner loves the bookstore owner. The bookstore owner is a revolutionary on the run. The guided-tour director is a gifted storyteller. His son loves the bakery assistant. The bakery assistant loves the hotel owner. Her mother is friends with the bookstore owner’s mother. I can’t say anymore without giving away the plot. The ending floored me.
March 10, 2013
I really enjoyed the humor that sometimes popped up in the dialogue, and there are some really coo images in this one. Overall, it isn't my favorite Boswell writing. Still, it is definitely a good book. I did enjoy reading.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews