Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord

Louis de Bernières is a masterful writer, which is to say his command of the various crafts of writing--creating character, innovative description, telling a whopping good story--weaves a spell and sucks you into the magic. From the moment Dionisio Vivo and Ramón "Cochinillo" Dario attend to the cravate corpse deposited in his garden by the coca lords, you become ensconced in the world of Ipasueño, its passions, ironies and political intrigues, and cease to be aware of the hand of Bernières behind the scenes.

Dionisio, a professor of philosophy, writes a series of letters, published in the prestigious journal La Prensa, castigating the coca trade, and from there the story spins furiously in many directions and subplots. There's the love affair of the century between Dionisio and Anica Moreno, Lazaro's tragic dance with leprosy, and--to the great pleasure of fans of Bernières's previous novel, The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts--further interactions with the magical jaguars and human inhabitants of Cochadebajo de los Gatos. Events take their course in the way of a grand tragicomedy, with the devastation that's expected followed by the irrepressible joy of life that's never expected and Bernières's tongue-in-cheek touch throughout.

It's a delightfully mesmerising book. Set in a mythical South American country that's a composite of real South American history and Bernières's fertile imagination, and therefore a perfect companion to take on a south-of-the-border vacation--the book is awash in the realities and flavour of South America and the lunacies of Bernières's genius. --Stephanie Gold

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Superb book. Tragic and comic. Light and Profound. - Rated
It would be a mistake to remember de Bernieres solely in terms of 'Captain Corelli', although that is undoubtedly a great book. For me, the trilogy of which 'Senor Vivo' is the central part is even better. Admittedly, it needs some concentration to remember all of the names of people and places, but it's really worth the effort in this case. It helps a little to read them in order, but I didn't, and still survived. A truly magnificent book!

Irreverent humour and gruesome violence - Rated
This book has wonderful irreverent humour contrasted with gruesome violence, all woven into an absolutely brilliant entrancing story. I'm sure I didn't understand all the nuances as I speak neither Spanish nor Portuguese but enjoyed it immensely. I may have made the mistake of not reading de Bernieres' earlier books in this series first, but am not sure I would have had a higher opinion of the book if I had done so.

FUNNY, SAD, SICKENING . . . AND A TECHNICAL MASTERPIECE - Rated
...I stand by my original thought that this book suffers from the post-modernity malaise: The author has brought together almost too many ideas, styles and techniques in the service of his agenda - at certain points these tend to obscure rather than clarify things. However, the depth of the message and the beauty of its expression have become clearer over time.

The message is simultaneously uplifting and painful: There is a grim symbiosis that unites corrupt and stupid governments with drugs and arms dealers in a feeding frenzy that destroys not just people but civilisation itself. Love and justice can be victorious, but only the kind of love that has more to do with self-sacrifice than romance, and only the kind of justice that is prepared to confront evil regardless of the cost. It's a profound but painful truth that only that strange hybrid of Marxism and Christianity called "Liberation Theology" has succeeded in developing systematically.

The book's principal stylistic flourish is "magical realism", a formula familiar to readers of Garcia Marquez and others. This piece of lit. crit. jargon means simply that magical events are an integral part of the plot, but, this being the world of po-mo, it only happens to make a point. In other words, the author does not require you to suspend disbelief as would be the case in a conventional magic story. This technique provides the opportunity for some of the book's most delicate and beautiful images, but on the downside it imposes a clumsy constraint on the author: He cannot narrate supernatural events directly and objectively - he has to do so in a subjective way from inside the head of one of his characters. This is not a criticism of the author - he executes this perceptual juggling with flawless technique. Rather, it is an indictment of the literary fashion that makes this sort of mannerism necessary. The self-distancing of the author from the world in which his characters live and move is unavoidably communicated to the reader, making it harder to engage with the characters or feel for them the way we would under the spell of a conventional narrative.

In this literary framework, only appalling suffering can draw us into the intensity of feeling for the characters that is necessary for the device to work. The story starts off in a light, satirical vain that will raise genuine rueful smiles and in its erotic moments even perhaps mildly titillate. The only searching question is whether he can reign the po-mo mannerisms in for long enough at a time to keep the story flowing, but Louis writes such beautiful prose that it is a pleasure to read. Nevertheless, the feelgood factor of the earlier chapters cannot last, and quite quickly the book descends into a nightmare of depraved violence. Louis narrates rape, torture, mutilation and so on with exactly the kind of elegant simplicity you would expect, and after the good humour of the early chapters the result is almost unbearably shocking.

I have some reservations as to whether even great literature should incorporate such graphic descriptions of sexual violence. I would certainly not wish to leave this book lying around the house where a young or impressionable person could be exposed to it. And in places Louis' literary technique almost gets the better of his artistic sensibility. Nevertheless, it stands as a remarkable achievement by a novelist of extraordinary gifts. If you are not afraid to laugh, cry and be sickened in one sitting, it is strongly recommended.

Such fine fretwork by a narrative musician - Rated
There is, I think, much music in everything de Bernieres has written. "Sunday Morning..." is a score sheet for voices and accents; "Corelli" is filed with the strings and the song of Italian opera; and the South American trilogy is suffused with a tropical rhythm all of its own. The man Louis himself, so I believe, is something of a musical enthusiast.

And as with all good music, there should be drink, there should be women and there should be magic. When these collide, of course, then there will be violence. In "Senor Vivo" there is, in abundance.

But it as vicious and as hard as it is romantic and poetic. And it is the balance of these factors - as with "Corelli" - that makes this book so fantastic, in both senses of the word. You can laugh and you can marvel at the tantric science of the President's lovemaking, but you will soon crumble at the prospect of what happens to Vivo's little Bugsita. The horror takes your breath away. And it is good for a book about the drugs trade to be so visceral. Amongst the fantasy there is a very real and very vivid truth being told.

The previous reviewer evidently disagrees. They are wrong. "Opinion, opinion..." you might well think, but no, then you would be wrong. It is not simply the facile "po-mo", "lit. crit." generally jargonese dismissal of magic realism that is misplaced (the magic of the book, in fact, is an evocation of the spiritual jungle and sierra Indians and their influence on the culture of this South American Erehwon), but the whole tenor of the argument is predicated on a lie. The book is not self-indulgent, it does not have an overarching personal agenda and it certainly does not disenfranchise the emotions of the reader. What it does is entertain, gloriously.

The narrative is never forced, but instead it plays out delicately in front of you with interweaving narratives and intimate portraits of endless fascinating characters. And yes, it does have a political message, but it is not forced down the reader's throat ("inexcusably pornographic", really, just no). Rather it cuts to the core in the most direct and clinical of ways. We may read about the coca trade in Colombia, but it's a far away, unrealised and dismissable problem - "yeah, I've heard there's a war going on over there. Don't suppose anyone cares though...they're all on drugs". In "Senor Vivo" the laughter dies on the cold reality of torture. And never are we more sober than when the joke is cut short.

Magic Realism, Swiftian satire, European Picareque - Rated
Louis de Bernières

Birthplace London, England

Education Manchester University, England

Other jobs What he calls "four disastrous months" in the British Army; teacher/cowboy in Colombia; car mechanic; landscape gardener; teacher of truants.

Did you know? When the declining communist Morning Star panned Captain Corelli for its portrayal of Greek communists, the author responded vigorously on the letters page: "How long are you people going to sit in the dark in an air-pocket, w****** each other off?

Critical verdict His overlooked early novels, a strange mixture of human kindness, spirit-world hijinks and bloody violence in a mythical Colombia, were either funny, inventive and moving, or a "Latin American theme park", depending on your point of view (the large cast of happy hookers is slightly disconcerting). Then came the Corelli phenomenon, in which he adds realism, Western history and a more sincerely achieved pathos to the rich brew. A truly international-spirited writer, de Bernières was twice shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize before winning with Captain Corelli's Mandolin in 1995 - the first British novelist to take the award. His next novel will be about the expulsion of Greeks from Turkey and vice versa after World War I ("a sort of enormous ethnic cleansing").

Recommended works There must now be a copy of Corelli for every man, woman and child on earth; if you stubbornly haven't read yours, do so. Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord, an allegory of love and corruption, is the best of Bernière's Latin American trilogy and illustrates his extraordinary facility for sudden switches between gentle comedy and sadistic bloodshed.

Influences Magical realism, especially Garcia Marquez; English and European picaresque; Swiftian satire.

Now read on Bernières' introduction to the Book of Job in the single-book Bible series is revealing of his literary credo. John Crowley shares his occult themes; Nick Joaquin is a Filipino author with a similar magical-realist project.