Synopses & Reviews
To fulfill his Ph.D. requirement, Fuertes decides to write about his father, the martyred president of Tinieblas, a country in Latin America. We follow Leon as he winds his twisted path through delinquency, learning, bravery, and incest to the presidency. At once a powerful vision of Latin American history and a brilliant parody of the academic form--complete with endnotes!--The Dissertation is an essential postmodern novel in the tradition of Vonnegut, Barth and Nabokov, ready to be embraced by a new generation of readers.
Review
"It gave me a lot of pleasure. As with
Pale Fire, it's the [end]notes I cherish and will read and reread." --Anthony Burgess
"One of the few books of the past 20 years that deserves to be called astonishing. It is a brilliant novel, structurally a marvel and, in all, a demonstration of elan as that quality seldom is experienced in a work of fiction." --Des Moines Sunday Register
Review
"A careful fake is better than the truth,
according to fictional Banana Republic
president León Fuertes, and so it is with
Kosters 1975 novel masquerading as a
doctoral dissertation, reissued after four
decades and still fresh, funny, and disturbingly
relevant. Brooklyn, N.Y.-born, Ivy League-
educated, longtime Panama resident Koster
portrays Latin America with a comedians
sense of timing, a scholars sense of history,
and a natives fond despair." —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Synopsis
The second book in R.M. Koster's highly acclaimed Tinieblas trilogy (following ), is the story of--and a story by--Camilo Fuertes.
About the Author
R.M. Koster was born in Brooklyn and has lived in Panama since 1957. He is the author of five novels and one work of contemporary history, and has had parallel careers as a university professor, reporter, and political activist. His shorter work has been published in the New Republic, Harper's, and Connoisseur, among others.