Thursday, April 7, 2011

CHE THE QUIXOTIC DREAMER

A couple of years ago, two buddies of mine got into a heated argument about Che Guevara. One guy, Jose, said that Che was the second most famous man in the world, after Jesus. The other guy, Richard, seemed to think that Che was less than admirable.

They argued late into the night, standing outside a restaurant in the rain. I didn't know enough about Ernesto "Che" Guevara to have an opinion. But I stood and listened. Now I am learning about Che.  

I'm reading Jon Lee Anderson's biography of Che, and it is fascinating. Anderson is a wonderful writer--he writes for The New Yorker, my favorite magazine, after all. The book is remarkably detailed.

Che was a very active, intense, fun-loving, and idealistic young man. He was also an aristocrat and quite the ladies man. You might even say he was a skirt chaser. He was a lover before he was a fighter, although he was always passionate and fearless.

He suffered from asthma, and that colored his whole outlook on life. He seems to have inherited his fearlessness from his mother Celia, who was also a daredevil. Young Ernesto was a grandiose and Quixotic dreamer who thought he could single-handedly change the world.

He could also be enormously self-centered. On one of his many trips, he and a buddy were sleeping in the barn of a nice family that had provided them shelter for the night. Warned of mountain lions in the area, Che heard scratching and growling at the barn door and fired a single shot from a revolver, killing the family's favorite dog.

Instead of staying to face the family's anguish and anger, Che and his buddy high-tailed it out of there. He was 23, and this was the time of his "Motorcycle Diaries."

So he wasn't always admirable.

I'm only about 80 pages into this 754-page book, but I plan to read the whole thing. This is one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read, and so far it's the best biography, more interesting even than those about Freud and Faulkner, whose writings young Ernesto also read, by the way.


-- Roger



© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

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