Yo maté a Kennedy

This is sorta a joint review with the next book in the series, Tatuaje, because while this one, Yo mate a Kennedy, may be the first Pepe Carvalho book, the series doesn't really start with it.

Yo mate a Kennedy is the hardest book I've read as I approach 4 million words (I read it a little shy of 3.5 million words). Despite the title it's less thriller and more political satire skewering america and spain. Think Dr Strangelove, but narrated by a spanish ex-marxist working for the CIA. And this was my big mistake, I read the blurb which describes the series that begins with the next book, Tatuaje, a very good noir in the vein of Marlowe and Spade and thought I'd be getting something like that, a private eye murder mystery, maybe investigating the assassination as a CIA agent? I don't know. Instead within the first couple of pages Jackie is quoting bad poetry while showing him around the Kennedys' invisible palace that floats above the White House. And it gets further disassociated from reality with every page. I never felt as if I could trust my reading or my understanding and it started with my false assumption of what type of book I'd be reading. Interspersed within these bizarre vignettes in which JFK spends far more energy obsessing over a quote by surrealist Andre Breton than governing, Lady Bird Johnson attempts and succeeds if only briefly in taking flight, a cast of real (Allen Dulles architect of the Iranian Coup, the Bay of Pigs, and some other coups here and there, so not a great guy) and fictional people plot awful things, our narrator engages in one-sided, highly didactic arguments with his ex about marxism and its relationship with literature or love or whatnot, my favorite of which involves a page long rant on her part followed by a one line retort by him essential telling her to go to hell. Did I mention it's really funny? It's really funny. But the heightened, formal, academic language of the marxist rants left my brain oozing from my ears ... but at least I knew what was happening in those sequences.

I never got my feet on the ground, ever. Maybe if you know what you're getting into you'll do better. If you look at amzn reviews you'll see people saying the same thing, ... um, not what I was expecting, ... could not follow the thread, ... For me this was leaps harder than Cronica de una muerte anunciada ... harder vocab, harder grammar, harder structure. I'll also add, as I finish Pedro Paramo, I'm giving the edge to Yo mate a Kennedy as the more difficult though they are closer.

The 3 star rating is because it was too hard for me to enjoy. I did, eventually, figure it out ... I think ... two months later. It is ambitious, fascinating, wonderfully strange but I wasn't up for it. Thankfully, it's short, about a third of my copy was afterward, so I'll reread this ... sometime ... in the distant future.

It was also leaps harder than the series second book, Tatuaje. Those marxist rants are still there in Tatuaje, but they are two sentences and more obviously funny. The structure is linear, there is an actual plot, clear and followable, but the vocab is still hard, a lot colloquialisms and a lot of slang ... not Sin noticias de Gurb level slang but hard. the afterword talks about something called "catalan bastardo" in which castellano is mixed with lower class catalanisms. I can't speak to that, one of the dangers of being self taught. But I did enjoy it, enormously; the barcelona he describes, filled with pimps and prostitutes, felt very real and very specific. And I like Spade and Marlow and this is a very good spanish version, very definitely spanish or catalan, something that I can't say the same about for many of the spanish mysteries I've read.

If you want the classic Pepe Carvalho experience, start with Tatuaje. Consider Yo mate a Kennedy some sort of out-of-series prequel that is in no way necessary to read to understand what happens after.