Un yuppie en la columna del Ché Guevara

A typical afternoon in the nineties, Ernesto Marroné, a successful executive for the conglomerate Tamerlán & Sons, returns to his country house to discover, in his teenager son’s room, a Ché Guevara poster. At that moment he realizes that the time has come for him to reveal his past as a guerrilla. Because the image of that emblematic man with his lion’s mane and steely stare has taken him back to the summer of nineteen seventy five, when his attempt to mediate the liberation of the company’s President, Mr. Fausto Tamerlán, kidnapped by the Montoneros group, converts him, after a chain of fatalities and misunderstandings, into the head of the column for the very same guerilla organization. There he discovers another world (militant, rough and supportive), and also love (the true kind), and he feels fit to embrace the cause of the “New Man”. He no longer worries about a successful career, a family, the hearth’s warmth, when chance, or perhaps mocking fate that seems to cruelly chase him, returns him to his previous life, as if the short summer of revolution had been nothing but a dream, that, on dissipating has left him half-way between desolation and disappointment. A hypnotic novel, A Yuppie in Ché Guevara’s Column narrates a period, the seventies, as no one has ever explained before: with exuberance and passion, with a dramatic quality that emerges from each page, with a gaze that does not give in to irony or to homage, portraying this intense moment in time as both sweet and atrocious. Carlos Gamerro has written a moving novel that enshrouds the reader, a novel that demonstrates how literature can dazzle with its plot and prose, and capture with its intelligence.