El Yanqui - Softcover

Unger, Douglas

4.05

19 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345349407 ISBN 13: 9780345349408

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1988

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In the late sixties, a young hippy from Long Island sent to Buenos Aires as an exchange student, finds his drinking and sexual escapades turn into dangerous political adventures, as an era of terror descends on Argentina

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From Publishers Weekly:

In 1969, the narrator (the titular Yanqui) is snatched from his accustomed ways as a quasi-hippie in his Long Island town and his chosen scene in the East Village and deposited as an exchange student in Buenos Aires. Ensconced as the overindulged "son" of a wealthy lawyer and his wife in a lavish home, he lives the life of the Argentinian rich, carousing, drinking, making a pass at a pretty servant girl, wrecking the family carand incidentally attending a Catholic school lorded over by a corrupt priest who represents the rigid, oppressive society of social privilege. The terrorist junta is in power, and relatively enlightened people are Peronistas in sympathy. The boy himself gets caught up in a protest demonstration and is detained and beaten by the police, while a girl he fancies "disappears." There is certainly a powerful subject here, but it is nearly drowned by voluminous detail, needless excursions and digressions, commonplace observation and surprisingly pedestrian prose. The author of the well-received Leaving the Land has imagination and narrative energy, but they misfire in this novel.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Coming after his well-received first novel, Leaving the Land , Unger's El Yanqui is a bit of a letdown. The setting is Argentina in the late 1960s, and the political unrest there is paralleled to unrest in the United States during the same period. "El Yanqui" is an exchange student from Long Island who leaves behind his aimless Sixties lifestyle to enjoy the benefits of a new country, a wealthy family, and good friends. But his new life comes to an end as his escapades in Argentina culminate in arrest for political reasons and his brother Harry returns home from Vietnam psychologically scarred. There's a good novel in here and a "telling" one at that, but it's a bit overwritten; the first-person prose sparkles in places, but too often excessive descriptive passages slow the book's pace. Recommended for larger public libraries. Thomas Lavoie, formerly with English Dept., Syracuse Univ., N.Y.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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