The Gringa
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
A gripping and subversive novel about the slippery nature of truth and the tragic consequences of American idealism …
Leonora Gelb came to Peru to make a difference. A passionate and idealistic Stanford grad, she left a life of privilege to fight poverty and oppression, but her beliefs are tested when she falls in with violent revolutionaries. While death squads and informants roam the streets and suspicion festers among the comrades, Leonora plans a decisive act of protest—until her capture in a bloody government raid, and a sham trial that sends her to prison for life.
Ten years later, Andres—a failed novelist turned expat—is asked to write a magazine profile of “La Leo.” As his personal life unravels, he struggles to understand Leonora, to reconstruct her involvement with the militants, and to chronicle Peru’s tragic history. At every turn he’s confronted by violence and suffering, and by the consequences of his American privilege. Is the real Leonora an activist or a terrorist? Cold-eyed conspirator or naïve puppet? And who is he to decide?
In this powerful and timely new novel, Andrew Altschul maps the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction, author and text, resistance and extremism. Part coming-of-age story and part political thriller, The Gringa asks what one person can do in the face of the world’s injustice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Altschul's rousing and complex third novel (after Deus Ex Machina) follows an impassioned American who spends years in prison in Peru for her involvement with a group of revolutionaries. Inspired by the true story of late-20-century activist Lori Berenson, Altschul recasts Berenson as Leonora "Leo" Gelb, a Stanford student sick of capitalist America who travels to Lima in the 1990s to fight injustice. After witnessing the bulldozing of a shantytown by government forces and the arrests of protesters whom she later realizes have been forcibly disappeared, Leo falls in with the Cuarta Filosof a, Marxist insurgents for whom she leases a house that serves as the group's headquarters. In 2008, 10 years after Leo's imprisonment, her story is told by an ex-pat novelist named Andres, who's been tasked with writing a profile of the "Gringa Terrorist" for a news website. As Andres chronicles Leo's emotional trajectory into violent collaboration, imagining her angst and self-doubt, he begins to second-guess his efforts and confesses he's made some things up. Blending historical details with literary allusions, Altschul successfully creates a postmodern, Cervantes-like labyrinth ("Everything is narrative," one of Leo's professors declares. "Thus, history is impossible"). Amid the clever games, Altschul's stirring portrait of the strident yet earnest Leo poses a salient question about the value of personal sacrifice.
