![]() ![]() ""Sucking Chest Wounds"" evokes a vivid impressionistic account of a day in the life of a journalist, and ""The Secret Admirers"" effectively uses Hemingway banter to tell the story of a near-encounter with Graham Greene. Elman has a good journalist's eye for quick characterizing detail. ![]() The journalism is most prevalent: ""When They Killed Macho Negro,"" for instance, is a precise description of post-Somozan nerves among young soldiers. Roughly, the book divides into three types of tellings: journalism told in the guise of fiction character sketches and fully-formed fictions. Prudhomme, his sidekick, is a convenient foil and sounding-board who allows the narrator to make sense, or to try to make sense, of the events he witnesses. ![]() ""Richard,"" the narrator of many of these sketches, is a composite of the author, of his friends, and of stories told to him. In those terms, it's a successful collection. The book is a fictional companion to an earlier collection of essays, Cocktails at Somoza's (1081), but it reads more like embellished journalism. ![]() Veteran Elman (The Breadfruit Lotteries, Taxi Driver) he re compiles some 30-odd fictions written about Nicaragua between 1978-the year of his first visit there-and 1987. ![]()
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