Gil Asakawa's

WRITING SAMPLES

BOOK REVIEWS

Back to Index of Writing Samples

CHE CHIC

CHASING CHE: A MOTORCYCLE JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF THE GUEVARA LEGEND
By Patrick Symmes
Vintage Books, 302 pp. $13

A book like "Chasing Che" can suffer from conceptualysis - a paralysis of execution due to the richness of its concept.

Freelance journalist Patrick Symmes followed in the tracks of a somewhat legendary 1952 motorcycle trip across South America. The journey was undertaken by two young idealists: a doctor, Alberto Granado, and a medical student and revolutionary-in-waiting, Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna.

It was somewhat legendary only because of the med student’s subsequent self-invention as Che Guevara, the handsome, forever-young guerilla fighter who would stand at Fidel Castro’s side before the decade was out. That, and the fact that both Che and Granado memorialized their two-wheeled trek (they shared one motorcycle, an ancient Norton they named "La Poderosa," or Powerful One) in journals which have been published separately over the years.

The man who would later become simply "Che" was the product of a well-to-do Argentine family with a yet-unfocused worldview that seems to have only included traveling the wide-open road and mooching free meals and rooms along the way. It’s an undistinguished profile that could fit any American undergrad on the way to the Bacchanalian delights of Spring Break. Except, the young Guevara came home from the road both politically and socially radicalized. He went on to become a key figure in Cuba’s Communist conversion, then a mythic Johnny Appleseed of Communism in other Latin American countries until his death in 1967 in the mountains Bolivia trying to ignite a revolution there.

"Whatever the twenty-three-year-old Ernesto was searching for - literary inspiration, adventure, or a solution to the world’s problems - he mounted the motorcycle with his eyes and mind open to the world he was about to enter," Symmes writes early on (he quotes passages from Guevara and Granado throughout the book). "His at-times brutal self-doubt was a sign of fundamental honesty, of an integrity uncontaminated by ideology or the habits of rigid thinking that political commitment required." That would come later.

Symmes, a New York-based Latin American correspondent for such U.S. publications as Outside, Harper’s and Conde Nast Traveler, decided to undertake Guevara and Granado’s route on a BMW motorcycle in 1996.

Using the earlier travelers’ published diaries as a map, he wanted to see if he could roll down the same roads to revolutionary radicalism as the earnest Ernesto. He takes about as long to cover the ground - over four months - even though Guevara and his companion lost their bike before the end of their "raid" (a term used in news stories at the time when the two were interviewed) and finished their journey by hitching rides and flying.

The resulting paperback is a very readable mixed bag of a book that’s part travelogue, part social commentary (both his own opinions and those of any number of people he meets along the trip and asks what they think of Che), part history lesson, part biography and part psychological profile.

"The rider and machine are literally balanced on the infinitely thin line where centripetal force meets gravity," Symmes deftly describes traveling by motorcycle during one travelogue passage.

His descriptive passages can be breathtakingly engaging: "It was a journey through solid light. Even the rain was luminescent at this altitude, and on the higher peaks I would simply climb up inside a cloud that glowed with the sun’s radiation, every misty raindrop a tiny moon catching and reflecting the light that pounded through the thin atmosphere."

The variety of approaches hangs together because of Symmes’ smartly non-intrusive persona, and the fact that he’s ultimately the central character without ever taking the emphasis off his relationship to the Che myth and the relationship of the Che myth to Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia and the rest of the world.

The myth of Che enchanted him, Symmes explains early in the book, because Che has become a legendary symbol of rebellion without being necessarily being anchored to any specific doctrine. In fact, during his travels Symmes encounters people everywhere who know little about Che or have all the facts wrong, but are convinced of Che’s convictions and their belief in them.

He ties these contradictory visions of the Che myth and the ever-present visage of the young, beret-bearing Che on everything from t-shirts and pins to murals and the contemporaneous news stories about the efforts to exhume Che’s remains, to contemporary Latin America. Symmes writes eloquently about the rampant corruption and violent governments of Chile and Peru, about the many guerrilla movements that have come and gone since Che’s death, and how neither the left nor right seem to have the answers anymore.

By the end of the book, he realizes that even the heroic El Che had undergone not only a radicalization from his teenaged naivete, when he first saw the level of poverty throughout his world, but also another, darker self-invention. By the tie of his violent death, Che’s ego, vanity and hunger for power led him to believe in his own myth.

In a funny way, so did Symmes. Although he’s careful not to let his book become a murky cliché about self-discovery, Symmes’ narrative from his very first dog bite to his various crashes and detours (he spends some idyllic days just hanging out in a forest and fishing every day) follows a personal evolution as well, including some comical results. By the end of the book, he’s become as adept at scamming a free meal and a place to sleep as Che was, and he becomes a bald-faced liar like his predecessor, trying to gain free publicity to help gain those free meals.

By the end of the book, however, Symmes is more sad than funny, as he closes the journey both literally at the place in Bolivia where Che was killed, and figuratively by then attending the service in Cuba a year later, when Che’s remains were finally discovered.

There’s a lot of food for thought served up along with the well-paced prose in "Chasing Che." Thankfully, the book doesn’t suffer from "conceptualysis" at all. 

This review ran in the Denver Rocky Mountain News