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El pais bajo mi piel | 
 enlarge | Author: Gioconda Belli
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $8.68
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 479631
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 1400034396
Dewey Decimal Number: 868.6409
EAN: 9781400034390
ASIN: 1400034396
Publication Date: October 14, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: BRAND NEW
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Product Description
Tras casarse muy joven y ser madre, Gioconda Belli se unio al clandestino y emergente movimiento Sandinista, sustituyendo su deseo de ser una buena esposa por la necesidad de vivir una vida plena y comprometida con los cambios sociales en su pais. Ironicamente, su pertenencia a la burguesia y su carrera como poeta renombrada, le brindaron la fachada que le permitio funcionar, secretamente, como rebelde. Desde su infancia en Managua y sus encuentros iniciales con poetas y revolucionarios, a persecuciones urbanas, reuniones con Fidel Castro, relaciones amorosas truncadas por la muerte o el exilio en México y Costa Rica, hasta su inesperado matrimonio con un periodista norteamericano, la historia de Gioconda Belli es tanto la de una mujer que se descubre a si misma, como la de una nacion que forja su destino.
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| Customer Reviews:
Bella Gioconda August 15, 2004
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Gioconda is another magnificent representative of the Latin American generation of authors that emerged in the seventies and eighties amidst social turmoils. Gioconda's artistry of words and poetry are evident throughout this book. Also the book arrangement, i.e. two threads set at two different time periods of her life, if not innovative fits nicely to convey her passionate, powerfully feminine message. This is perhaps the strongest point in this autobiography: the utmost defense of "las companeras" in her struggle for equality and respect.
Other little jewels are Gioconda's experience with iconic men like Torrijos and Fidel. These two anecdotes deserve to be in a study of the human condition: even in an egalitarian or progressive mind, machismo can be present.
My 4 out of 5 star rate for this book is related to the author's ambiguous political position after the collapse of Sandinismo. In the last part of the book her message comes forth blurred by Gioconda's comfortable upper middle-class life in a serene Californian homestead. Suddenly, all that life-commitment with the revolution becomes a Sunday afternoon TV movie on "Oxygen" or "We". Then several pages, filled with apparently extensively meditated explanations, try to justify why she chose comfort to revolution. Personally, I think she closed the circle (as she likes to repeat through her book): she came back to her cradle in a solacing environment. Eventually, she goes back to Nicaragua to plunge back into "people's struggle" while being aware that she can always return to his Californian refuge. Not exactly a revolutionary life.
Ambiguos impression of Belli's political stance....... February 16, 2004
8 out of 15 found this review helpful
I've read the book (in its extremely sensitive and emphatic German translation immediately after my wife finished reading it and told me that it was a must for me to read!)The "must" was worthwhile because of the incredible breadth of Belli's writing expressiveness and intensity of the emotions expressed. In this respect I felt with her and for her in all her moods, life situations, her frustrations and her moments of joy. Reading it in that way, it is truthful, self-critical, just fascinating. But....and the BUT is my critical BUT.....where Belli, whose dairy-like autobiography this is (because otherwise whe would never have been able to reconstract the three decades of her life she talks about in "The Country Under My Skin" where she recalls all those names an situations with the accuracy as she does), the political aspect being portrayed in the book is strikingly unfair
and is in severe contradiction to what is known to have actually happened between the terribel '72 earthquake and the end of the millenium as regards the Sandinistas and their revolution and the latter-day developments.
The political stance Ms. Belli takes throughout her narrative is heavily lop-sided, if not naïve. Ms. Belli, who has in many ways "run into her hated enemy's arms" by living in the US, and does not really appear to have had any qualms about it, nor about passing on pure hear-say about political intrigues and movemements, acribically puts down dates and names and improper behaviour of the so-called enemies of the revolution, but she does not find any need to set right the warped political picture her Sandinista ideologists have slyly - and successfully - embedded in her mind. Ms. Belli should stick to writing her very beautiful prose - and stop loving her country by lashing out at phantoms, and painting a halo of "libertador" on irrespressive revolutionaries like Castro at al.....Nicaragua has not stopped suffering from the aftereffects of power-obsessed personalities, much as as it had been suffering from the Somoza nightmare.
To be sure that I am not just blowing off steam for the sake of criticism, I have once again taken time and consulted credible sources on the actual facts of Nicaraguas transition from Somozism to Sandinism-Tercereistas and the years that followed....and have tried to do this without being blind on one eye... What I have finally found to be a representative truth does certainly not identify with many aspects Ms. Belli sets forth in her autobiography.
Personally, I love South America. My mother tongues were English and Spanish, having spent my childhood in Venezuela, Argentina, Perú and Colombia.
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