The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey

by Salman Rushdie Narrated by John Curless

Overview

"I did not go to Nicaragua intending to write a book, or, indeed, to write at all: but my encounter with the place affected me so deeply that in the end I had no choice." So notes Salman Rushdie in his first work of nonfiction, a book as imaginative and meaningful as his acclaimed novels. In The Jaguar Smile, Rushdie paints a brilliantly sharp and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the terrain, and the poetry of "a country in which the ancient, opposing forces of creation and destruction were in violent collision." Recounting his travels there in 1986, in the midst of America's behind-the-scenes war against the Sandinistas, Rushdie reveals a nation resounding to the clashes between government and individuals, history and morality.

Editorial Reviews

New York Times Book Review

Stirring and original...an impressionist picture of the country in bright patchwork colors. —New York Times

Dan Cryer

A vivid and probing introduction for perplexed outsiders trying to make sense of Nicaraguan dilemmas.
— Newsday

From the Publisher

A vivid and probing introduction for perplexed outsiders trying to make sense of the Nicaraguan dilemmas.”—Newsday
 
“Written with a novelist’s eye for irony and metaphor . . . [Rushdie] is able to make us see that the factual reality of this country already verges on the surreal.”—The New York Times Book Review

“To say of The Jaguar Smile that it is a work of art is to take full note of its literary allusions, its uncompromising sensitivity to death and destruction, is ready political eye for the funny and grotesque, and above all its understated and gripping eloquence.”—Edward W. Said
 
“A look at intelligence struggling, with limited sources, not to be entirely extinguished in the service of faith . . . an account of the confusion any one of us might feel if we visited Nicaragua and gave it a chance to affect us, because it is an inescapably affecting land, crashing through abrupt change that escapes the easy categories of ideologues . . . good reading.”­—The New York Times

“The account that emerges . . . is, as one would expect, quickened by the novelist’s eye. . . . Compelling.”—Time

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171256487
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	07/01/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

HOPE: A PROLOGUE
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Jaguar Smile"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Salman Rushdie.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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