Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Pg. 69: David Gullette's "Dreaming Nicaragua"

Today's feature at the Page 69 Test: Dreaming Nicaragua by David Gullette.

About the book, from the publisher:
Jesse Pelletier is a Vietnam vet who runs a cheap hotel named Ospedjae Gringo Pinolero in San Juan del Sur, a beach town in southern Nicaragua. The year is 2000. Jesse’s previously-estranged daughter, Suzy, is visiting him for the first time; she falls for a local ecological activist, Camilo Sanchez, who promptly disappears. Or maybe he has been disappeared. But counterpointed with the realistic millenial material is an earlier imagined San Juan del Sur, in the 1850s, where another Jesse Pelletier, veteran of the Mexican War, has married a local girl and runs a hotel catering to the Gold Rush-bound passengers of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York-San Francisco steamship line. The parallel timeframes and intrigues and characters (including Mark Twain and the “Filibuster” chief, William Walker) echo off against each other as the tension rises.
Read more about Dreaming Nicaragua at the Fenway Press website.

David Gullette is an English professor at Simmons College and the author of two books about revolutionary poetry in Nicaragua.

The Page 69 Test: Dreaming Nicaragua.

--Marshal Zeringue