Gods Go Begging by Alfredo Vea
Gods Go Begging
One could argue that the war novel is an essentially timeless genre.
Weapons are subject to long and increasingly lethal refinement--but from
Homers day to our own, the fear, fury, remorse, and anguish
experienced on the battlefield have hardly changed a whit. Still, the
stories told by Vietnam-generation novelists may differ in the telling. A
writer like Alfredo Vea draws on a myriad of cultural and literary traditions
to evoke the peculiar terrors of Vietnam--while invariably reflecting the
outsider status of the soldiers who fought in the conflict. And for both of
these reasons, his third novel, Gods Go Begging, is a remarkable work.
Vea begins his story in present-day San Francisco. The protagonist,
Jesse Pasadoble, is a former Army sergeant whos now made a name for
himself as a criminal defense attorney. Haunted by wartime memories,
Pasadoble has found a way to channel his anguish: his impoverished
clients remind him of his suffering comrades, and he seeks a
compensatory justice for what he and his platoon lost. Jesse hated
death. He did not fear it, but he hated it with all of his heart and soul. A
year and a half of incredible fear in the highlands of Vietnam had been
transformed into an almost anguished love the living, intact moment, the
moment that can never be possessed. Like many of the men who have
witnessed the best and worst in themselves, who have been given a
glimpse of the end of their lives at a very young age, he had lost the
power to be lonely. The power had been replaced by something else: a
soul sickness; a hunger for beauty, but only at a distance. Though he
could not love his own life and the things within it, Jesse hated death.
His newest client is a 12-year-old boy, a child of the projects whos been
charged with the brutal murder of two women. As the case unfolds, the
barriers between past and present, America and Vietnam, erode and
finally disappear. Meanwhile, Vea expertly marries the magical realism of
Gabriel García Márquez to his visceral accounts of battle. Indeed,
whether we measure by the breadth of his imagination, the strength of his
characters, or the hallucinatory power of his prose, there seems to be no
novelistic terrain that Vea cant conquer. A chronicle of defeat and
suffering, Gods Go Begging represents a paradoxical victory for the
author--and, of course, for the reader. --Ted Leventhal
The style used to write the book is amazing. I love most how it continually
jumps back and forth through different times and memories of the main
character, Jesse Pasadoble. By doing this, it only lets the audience find
out little portions of the story at a time. By the end of the novel, everything
comes together and makes for a beautiful plot line. Alfredo Vea also
forces you to fall in love with several of his characters by making them so
charismatic. The reader, shortly through the book, begins loving to read
every single line about any one of the amazingly created characters. If you
read it, you will love it.
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