All Aboard the Andean Express — (and I mean all)
Posted by: Admin
When did my compulsive listing of characters begin?
I think it was reading the Oz books in middle school. I was trying to create a concordance between the fourteen Oz books written by L. Frank Baum and his related novels. I was horrified to find there were discrepancies. I think from there it went to listing all the characters in War and Peace. As I remember, I only made it through the first 400 pages.
I like watching how characters are introduced into the narrative, bit by bit or all at once, however the author does it. I like adding up all their little facts and traits into a whole. Because I like character listing, my book groups often get a little email attachment in their monthly newsletter called Nick’s Notes, all the characters in a novel we’ve been reading listed in the order they appear, with all their accumulated character traits and histories, with page numbers.
Well, I’ve met my match. I’ve just met a trainload of characters. Within the first thirty pages of the Bolivian novel, Andean Express, by Juan de Recacoechea, the reader meets over twenty different characters. My notepaper was covered with insertion marks and arrows.
It all begins at the La Paz train station in 1952, as the train is about to depart on a twenty-four hour trip across the Andean plateau to Arica in Chile. Our main character is Ricardo, an eighteen-year-old graduate from high school just two weeks ago, heading home for vacation, for the first time traveling alone. As the train goes chugging down the track toward nightfall, Ricardo is falling in love with a girl who just got married, an assassination is being planned, a woman who’s been separated from her dog tries to get him out of the freight car, a mother and daughter are planning on getting back what was stolen from them, and the Franciscan priest who thinks Ricardo is asleep in the upper bunk is behaving in a very unpriestlike manner.
This feels like the Bolivian version of Murder on the Orient Express, with a little political flavor in the background, a little nostalgia for the days of steam engines, and just the thrill of a plot clattering across a high altitude plain where oxygen is low and where sex can be deadly for the weak of heart.
Okay, this blog is long enough – back to reading.
