Imagine yourself as an American young man, twenty-two years old, who lives in a Mayan village on a lake with three volcanoes. You meet a girl, and cling to each other as you listen to radio broadcasts about imminent war. Their first night together, an earthquake at three AM kills twenty-two thousand people. Plimsoll's memoir "WMD Machete" describes his Pan-American coming-of-age with a cast of real-life characters like-the English voyeur with no film in his camera, four-eyed fish, castles and churches full of vampires, the Negro Princess of the Moskito Indians, the founder of what will become Guatemala's famous ecological park, Peace Corp workers and expatriate University Professors, Mayan Indian cooks as practical jokers, an exotic mercenary French nudist, a sixteen year old Tarzan, an American single mom expatriate writer and her sexually indistinct son, an American dad who kidnapped his daughter, Guatemalan press corps killers for hire, communist kidnappers, whores and blind Saints, and most intimately, an artistic and intellectually curious boy named Brandon, the young Mr. Plimsoll.

Posted on Sunday 27 of August, 2006 [05:16:21 UTC]