review of
Paco Ignacio Taibo II's Four Hands
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 15-19, 2019

FULL REVIEW: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1146194-taibo

I haven't gotten tired of praising Taibo yet. Reading his work is almost like reading the work of Philip K. Dick when I 1st started reading his work in 1984 & ended up reading almost a bk by him per wk for the entire yr — in other words, the Taibos are engrossing. I am immediately interested & I read them quickly. This particular Taibo bk is actually 'signed' — whether the signature is authentic or not I wdn't know but it's got 'PIRII/94" written on the title page.

Ya just never know what juicy thing Taibo'll dream up next. In this case, it's Stan Laurel wtinessing the assassination of a major Mexican revolutionary.

""They killed Pancho Villa!" he screamed.

"The scream broke Stan's trance and he managed to lift the gin to his lips. He emptied the bottle. It was 8:02 in the morning, July 20, 1923." - p 6

The inter-related narratives include an American named "Alex" who runs a branch of the secret police called the "SD". Their nefarious purpose being a particularly nasty mixture of assassination & disruption & character assassination thru disinformation. Taibo depicts him as diabolically conscience-free. An E. Howard Hunt sort, perhaps. I wonder if Taibo ever read any of Hunt's crime fiction novels?

"Alex is just inches from clinical paranoid schizophrenia. If the psychiatrist continues to question this diagnosis, Alex himself doesn't have a shadow of a doubt, he's completely convinced of his absolute insanity. But as long as they'll let him, he'll keep running the SD, owner and master, omnipotent czar, ruler of strange destinies. And it doesn't bother him to play God in an office that one enters through a hat boutique, a ladies' room, a cleaning closet, a service elevator, a fire escape stairwell, a window and the boss's desk. Actually, he loves it. This is his idea of heavenly bureaucracy." - p 12

Note that the translator, Laura C. Dail, writes " ladies' ", not adding an "s" after the apostrophe for the possessive of a word ending in "s", but writes " boss's ", adding an "s" after the apostrophe for the possessive of a word ending in "s". TAKE THAT, RULE-MONGERERS!! Otherwise note that this extreme villain is referred to by his 1st name, almost as if he's a personal friend, uncomfortably practically making him family despite the extremity of his socipathic behavior.

"On the night of the fifth or sixth of February, 1926, unknown intruders entered the Pantheon in Parral, profaning the tomb of the caudillo of the Agrarian Revolution of the North, slashed off the head of the cadaver and stole it. The affair caused rivers of ink to run in the North American press, since the United States continued to feed the myth of the fierce bandit who had dared in 1916 to attack the town of Columbus, in New Mexico, accomplishing the only foreign invasion in the history of modern North America. The Los Angeles papers devoted a large space to Villa and the pursuit of him. Mexican rumors rapidly crossed the border, placing the missing head one day in the hands of the widow of a rich rancher whom Villa had assassinated, another day a circus had it and was touring Texas exhibiting the remains, then it was in the hands of a group of fugitive lunatics from a mental asylum in Chihuahua, after that it was the illicit property of an Oklahoma spinster who had been in love with the Mexican military genius and who had commissioned a band of professional thieves from San Francisco to steal it." - p 15

Now, I shd point out that I deserve a fucking medal for quoting that last passage b/c I found Pancho Vila's head flattened like a flower between the pages where that passage appears & it was a mess, I'll tell you what!!. Maybe that's why Taibo signed this copy.

"Pancho Villa’s coffin had been dug up during the night and his body mutilated. Amparan was reluctant to report the desecration to the municipal authorities because Villa’s body had been decapitated and the head was missing." - https://www.theyucatantimes.com/2018/11/the-beheading-of-pancho-villa-92-years-o...

But what about John Dillinger's penis?

"One of the more bizarre celebrity legends is the claim that notorious bank robber John Dillinger was not only the proud possessor of an unusually large penis, but that this portion of his anatomy was removed post-mortem and put on display at one of the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C. (Some versions state that the receiving institution was not the Smithsonian but the Armed Forces Medical Museum, which is on the grounds of the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington.) That the Smithsonian denies having (or ever having had) this piece of classic Americana in their collection is part of the game, of course. (An auxiliary portion of the legend is that Smithsonian docents, upon being asked where Mr. Dillinger’s organ can be found, will not deny its presence in the collection but will fabricate an excuse as to why it is not currently on display.)

"How and when this rumor got started is unknown. No documentary evidence indicates that Dillinger was renowned for either his sexual prowess or his possession of a prodigious member during his lifetime." - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/penal-institution/

You know the infamous SPK video where they show a corpse's head being held in a hand that's making it perform fellatio on a corpse's erect male member? Was that Pancho Villa & John Dillinger? Does the slang term "Deadhead" have anything to do w/ this?

"And to this astonishing information, one can add some of the legendary stories transmitted by the cultured natives in the Jesuit missions who say "the invisible people," "the big men" lived crazily following some insane reasoning, and practiced free sex in their ceremonies, later returning to normalcy, and they did not have chiefs, nor did they engage in war, nor did they have Gods or permanent homes (Cabrera, 147, 190-198, 212). - p 27

Wha?! Having just plopped that down in front of you w/o context it's only fair to add:

"Lydia Cabrera (May 20, 1899 in Havana, Cuba – September 19, 1991 in Miami, Florida) was a Cuban independent ethnographer.

"Cabrera was a Cuban writer and literary activist. She was an authority on Santería and other Afro-Cuban religions. During her lifetime she published over one hundred books; little of her work is available in English. Her most important book is El Monte (Spanish: "The Wilderness"), which was the first major ethnographic study of Afro-Cuban traditions, herbalism and religion. First published in 1954, the book became a "textbook" for those who practice Lukumi (orisha religion originating from the Yoruba and neighboring ethnic groups) and Palo Monte (a central African faith) both religions reaching the Caribbean through African slaves. Her papers and research materials were donated to the Cuban Heritage Collection - the largest repository of materials on or about Cuba located outside of Cuba - forming part of the library of the University of Miami. A section in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's book Tres Tigres Tristes is written under Lydia Cabrera's name, in a comical rendition of her literary voice. She was one of the first writers to recognize and sensitively publish on the richness of Afro-Cuban culture and religion. She made valuable contributions in the areas of literature, anthropology, art, ethnomusicology, and ethnology." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia_Cabrera

Cool, huh?! Aren't you glad I told you about her? Don't you want to just find & read one of her bks now ASAP?! But back to Alex & the SD:

"That's why Alex's idea was interesting. In the beginning it would be enough to saturate the enemy machinery with abundant disinformation and then offer the poor misguided a providential exit." - pp 34-35

"The members of the original SD didn't even know they belonged to an organization with a strange name, and the officials who had authorized its existence didn't have the slightest idea that the operative unit they had approved was known by Alex as the Shit Department (SD)." - p 35

Now, if one were using the SD as a generalized example one might say "Take a Shit Department..".

"Fats had compiled more interesting material, which we could use to fill a good historical piece on the Revolution of the Carnations of April for which Madrid's Historia 16 had already offered by phone." - p 39

An interesting thing about reading multiple bks 'at the same time' (not actually simultaneously but alternating w/ each other) is the way synchronicities can occur. I wdn't've known what the Revolution of the Carnations of April meant if I hadn't just read about it in Scott MacDonald's Avant-Doc — specifically the interview w/ Portuguese moviemaker Susana de Sousa Dias.

"Susana de Sousa Diaz's experience of the fall of the Salazar regime in 1974 when she was 12 years old helped to create a fascination with the nature of the Portuguese experience during the decades before the Carnation Revolution freed the nation from forty-eight years of dictatorship." - p 266, Avant-Doc

"On December third of '75, Alex returned to New York from Lisbon on a Pan Am flight just hours before Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and the military officers of COPCON, the extreme left of the Movimiento de la Fuerzas Armadas, had been arrested, accused of implication in the preparation of a military coup." - p 43

"Otelo Nuno Romão Saraiva de Carvalho, GCL (Portuguese pronunciation: [ɔˈtɛlu sɐˈɾajvɐ dɨ kɐɾˈvaʎu]; born 31 August 1936), is a retired Portuguese military officer. He was the chief strategist of the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Lisbon. After the Revolution, Otelo assumed leadership roles in the first Portuguese Provisional Governments, alongside Vasco Gonçalves and Francisco da Costa Gomes, and as the head of military defense force COPCON."

[..]

"On 25 November 1975, a military radical left-wing coup was attempted, made up of members of the MFA, the Portuguese Army Commandos, and COPCON under the leadership of Otelo. The coup, orchestrated by Otelo, failed to take control of the Portuguese government. As a result of the coup, Otelo was imprisoned, COPCON was disbanded, and António Ramalho Eanes rose to power. As punishment for participation in the coup, Otelo was imprisoned for three months." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otelo_Saraiva_de_Carvalho

I've assumed that Alex & the SD were fictional characters used to explain US government dirty tricks. I looked superficially online to see if I cd find an "alex sd" but didn't. I then turned to a bk I have called Secret Police (1981) by Thomas Plate & Andrea Darvi. I found an "SD" based in Haiti & an "SDB" based in Yugoslavia but nothing for the US. Despite this, it seems relevant to quote the following:

"However, certain internal-security practices common to a SAVAK or a DINA have been adopted in the United States. Those aspects include extensive surveillance of political activity—in particular, although not exclusively, of the Left, and considerable counterintelligence penetration of left-wing groups, including the employment of agent-provocateur techniques.

"In order to achieve a high degree of political surveillance, the United States system of surveillance has operated in a highly decentralized, and to an important degree, unorganized fashion. This disorganization and decentralization derives from the complex political organization of the republic itself, as it operates on at least five levels: federal, state, county, city, and private corporate.

"The federal component of this sytem has included Army Intelligence; the CIA (which is prohibited in theory, but not in reality, from domestic spying); the FBI (practicing the classic variety of surveillance techniques, including surreptitious entry, penetration by informants, and electronic eavesdropping, as well as the usual agent-provocateur and disinformation measures); and the NSA (National Security Agency), with the technological ability to tap telephone conversations and other electronic communications. For a time, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency was a potentially active member of this system, but the Watergate revelations, which resulted in the resignation of President Nixon, curbed that development. At times, other agencies in the mammoth federal government have plugged into this informally organized intelligence system. For instance, in 1967, the Community Relations Service, in theory set up by the 1964 Civil Rights Act to mediate and conciliate racial disputes, was authorized to spy on militant black, antiwar, and radical protest groups."

- p 294, Secret Police — The Inside Story of a Network of Terror

Now, that bk was published in 1981 & Four Hands was copyrighted in 1990 so it's not too far-fetched to think that Taibo might've been influenced by this type of information in creating the Alex character & his SD. Now, imagine how much the US secret police state may've developed since then, since 9/11, & since the various horrible presidents (wch I include Obama in). I recently read Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Earth (2005/2015) in wch a character is surveilled by a US 'intelligence' organization similar to Taibo's SD in its slippery peripheralness. In the novel, Robinson presents the various groups that surreptitiously keep track of American citizens. Here's his list followed by an addition from this here reviewer:

""The Air Intelligence Agency. Army Intelligence and Security Command. Central Intelligence Agency. National Clandestine Service. Coast Guard Intelligence. Defense Intelligence Agency. Office of Intelligence, Department of Energy (really?). Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State. Office of Intelligence Support, Department of the Treasury. National Security Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate. Marine Corps Intelligence Activity. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. National Intelligence Council. National Reconnaissance Office. National Security Agency. Office of Naval Intelligence. United States Secret Service.

""The Covert Action Staff. The Department of Homeland Security, Office of Intelligence and Analysis. The Directorate of Operations. Drug Enforcement Administration. Office of National Security Intelligence.

""The United States Intelligence Community (a cooperative federation).

FULL REVIEW: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1146194-taibo ( )

Stan laurel, Pancho villa, dos periodistas que han dormido en decenas de aeropuertos y que practican la religión de la exclusiva, una extraña oficina en Nueva Yorek, dedicada a la manufactura de la leyenda de un narco, los asombrosos proyectos de tesis de Helena Jordán, un joven comandante sandinista, la misteriosa novela policiaca que se está escribiendo en Coyoacán en 1939... y esto es para empezar.

Ce livre était sur le présentoir de Joli Mai, avec une petite note le conseillant vivement. Je croyais que c'était une sortie récente, mais en fait, il a reçu un prix en 1991... A l'instar de Clochards Célestes, j'ai eu beaucoup de mal à le lire, et pourtant, j'en garde un excellent arôme, et je voudrais le relire un jour à tête reposée.

Ce livre n'est pas un livre, c'est un puzzle, composé de plus d'une centaine de chapitres qui s'assemblent petit à petit pour former un tout. A travers ces parties, on voyage dans les pensées des différents (et nombreux) personnages du récits, dans le XXème siècle, et dans le monde, principalement en Amérique du Sud. Mais la trame, le lien qui réunit les différentes pièces du puzzle, ce sont les révolutions, en étoile centrale de notre système solaire d'humanité.

L'écriture m'a marqué par sa densité : un nombre important de détails, anecdotes, références au siècle dernier parsèment le bouquin, et l'en rendent encore plus vivant. Sans en perdre sa valeur historique, cette écriture est également marqué par une pointe non négligeable d'humour, de dérision et de surréalisme même : je pense par exemple, à la description du département CIA de la merde, ou encore à la rencontre du nain, de la secrétaire et de ses invisibles admirateurs.

A quatre mains, on se retrouvera ! ( )

Roman hallucinant qui raconte à travers tout un ensemble de portraits les agissements de la CIA en Amérique latine, l’attraction qu’exerce sur les journalistes de gauche les révolutions latino-américaines (Cuba, Nicaragua…) etc.
Au milieu de nombreuses histoires annexes, le cœur du roman : une officine de la CIA (le SD) tente de déstabiliser le pouvoir sandiniste en montant de toutes pièces une histoire de corruption d’un ministre avec la mafia et la drogue. Dans ce scénario très élaboré, 2 journalistes en quête de révolution vont jouer une partie, manipulés mais jamais totalement.
Le drame de l'Amérique latine au coeur de multiples histoires qui se croisent. Un traitement drôle d'une réalité qui ne l'est pas. ( )