This book is set in South America. It is inspired by real events and a cinematographer, Hans Ertl. Each chapter is written in first person by a character of the story. Hans is married with three daughters. He is seldom home due to extensive travel for work. “Leave, that’s what Papa knew how to do best.” The reader learns what life is like during travels in the Amazon and life of a single mother in South America.

Since each chapter portrays a character’s perspective, the reader gains insight into each character quite well. The daughters move into adulthood and provide very different perspectives in many aspects of life. Exposure to political rebels is brought into the story from a different view.

Relationships, political rebellion, miscarriage, and marital issues are all aspects of this book. Character development is well done. This book is a novelette and leaves you wishing for more.

Published in Spanish in 2015; published in translation in 2016; published by Simon & Schuster on September 12, 2017

A German family relocates to La Paz after World War II. The father, Hans Ertl, was a cameraman for Nazi filmmaker/propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. By the 1950s, Hans has reinvented himself as an explorer/photographer/documentarian. He disappears for months at a time, usually to climb mountains, but his goal as the novel starts is to find the lost city of Paitití. His daughter Monica, who doesn’t want to be in La Paz, agrees to join him on his quest, as does her sister Heidi. Point of view shifts from Heidi to her sister Trixi, who stays home with their mother Aurelia while Monica and Heidi are in the jungle with their father.

The novel tracks the family over a period of decades, but this is a short novel, so there are significant gaps in the family history after the search for Paititi. The story is set against a background that includes the Bolivian revolution, the military dictatorships that followed, and the unsuccessful guerrilla war waged by Che Guevara and others to bring down the dictatorships.

The background moves into the forefront when the novel focuses on Monica’s lover Reinhard, who is also the brother of her husband. Chapters devoted to Reinhard are told in Reinhard's voice, in the form of answers to questions, conveying the impression that Reinhard is being interrogated as he talks about Monica, who fell in love with a Bolivian guerrilla named Inti and became an indispensable part of the revolutionary movement. A brief chapter gives us the perspective of Inti before he becomes the ill-fated leader of Che’s National Liberation Army.

Toward the end of the 1960s, in the aftermath of Monica’s relationship with Inti, the story again touches upon Hans and his daughters. Hans has reinvented himself (again) after a failed expedition. His relationship with his family is strained, including an inevitable confrontation with Monica who (given her father’s history) should not be surprised by his willingness to tolerate a fascist government.

Affections tells an intense but ambiguous story, based in large part on real people. The events in family members' life are presented superficially but the characters (at least Monica and her father) are drawn in greater depth than the plot. Other characters have a tendency to drift away, giving the novel an episodic and unfinished feel. Rodrigo Hasbún leaves many questions unanswered, the kind of questions a literature professor might ask (What was Hasbún saying when Hans hired workers to dig a deep hole on his property?) and that have no clear answers. I found that mildly frustrating, probably due to my lack of imagination or an anal desire to have all questions firmly answered. But life is frustratingly full of unanswered questions and literature should reflect life, so I can’t fault the novel for doing that. In the end, I admired the novel’s atmosphere, its portrayal of key characters, and Hasbún’s prose. That’s enough to overcome my puzzlement and to earn a recommendation.

RECOMMENDED

A German family emigrating to South America shortly after Worl War II. Hans, a famous film-maker and alpinist who had worked with Leni Riefenstahl, his wife and the three girls Monika, Heidi and Trixi. The father wants to explore the new world, Monika and Heidi accompany him, but they cannot find the lost Inca city. Soon after, the life of the family falls apart. The father is travelling the world, Monika gets married and Heidi is returning to Europe. Only Trixi remains with the mother who is already suffering from cancer and finds her death in the 1950s. The girls’ lives and interests couldn’t hardly differ more. Heidi leads a traditional life in Germany, Trixi is somehow forlorn in Bolivia and Monika has become a fierce supporter of Che Guevara and the guerrillas in South America.

Rodrigo Hasbún, one of the major Spanish-speaking voices in contemporary literature, has based his novel on the true story of the Ertl family. It is supposed that Monika Ertl was to avenger of Che Guevara’s death: in 1971, Bolivia’s ambassador Roberto Quintanilla Pereira was killed in his office in Hamburg by a woman who is supposed to have been her. Off all things, Monika was her father’s beloved child of in whom he saw his only true heiress.

Monika’s life a most intriguing considering the close connection to the Nazi regime, then her fight with and for the guerrilla, the assassination ascribed to her and her death in the Bolivian jungle. Yet, the novel could not really catch me. The characters remain too distant, too vague to really become fascinating and captivating. I would have liked to get in Monika’s head, to learn how she develops her ideals and her conviction for the fight. But also the others are too distant for me to really get interested in their life and emotions and thoughts.

Apart from the rather shallow characters, the story is centred around the family life. Yet, there are too many leaps in time, too many gaps unfilled to create a complete picture. When Heidi leaves for Germany, her story is lost. Why Trixi is so much detached from the world, remains unclear to me. And the father’s end of career is explained in just one or two sentences.

All in all, an interesting historical figure who could have translated into a great story, but the novel is a bit too superficial in many respects to really convince me.

Family dynamics and the way history and your environment effect the very nature of your being is what this somewhat short story dwells upon. We are introduced to the Ertl family who have escaped to Bolivia following World War 2 where the father, Hans, was a cameraman for the filmmaker/propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Hans, ever the one for fantastic ideas, embarks on a search enlisting two of his daughters, for the lost city of Paitití, resulting in disastrous consequences.

In Bolivia the political unrest ensuing allows for the rise of Che Guevara which one of Hans's daughters, Monika, follows and eventually becomes know as his "avenger." As one can imagine all does not end well for her.

This tale is a story of a family's dissolution through the path that each member follows. While some are left to follow foolhardy practices, others within the family are left to pick up the pieces of their actions. The time frame of the sixties and seventies with both their enthusiasm and violence are laid out in this tale. Sad but ultimately true, the concept that families fall apart when some of their members commit themselves to life's foolish paths holds true.

Thank you to NetGally and Simon and Schuster for providing an advanced copy of this book for an unbiased review.

Hans Ertl was Leni Riefenstahl’s cameraman and although never a member of the Nazi party was blacklisted in Germany after the war and fled with his wife and three daughters to Bolivia. There he embarked on an ill-fated expedition in search of the legendary Inca city of Paititi. The failure of the expedition seems to have been the catalyst for the breakdown of his family life and this short novel is both a family saga and an exploration of the politics of the era in South America. I found the novel quite baffling at times and I think it’s worth the reader finding out about the political and historical background before embarking on it. The story is told through a series of vignettes narrated by family members in turn. It’s a spare narrative in spite of the increasingly dramatic events it deals with and I found it curiously lacking in emotion. None of the characters came fully alive for me and I remained detached from their fate. The book opened up a small by-way of history for me and for that alone I’m pleased to have read the book, but it wasn’t one I particularly enjoyed.

This book was short, but it sure packs a lot of punch. This is the story of a family falling apart piece by piece. The story is told in different view points, but it works very well.

I loved this book--the unexpectedness of the setting, the thoughtful depiction of a place as seen from the outside, the complications of family life--all told in an endearing set of voices and translated with excellence and care.

Thank you Simon & Schuster for making this arc available to me through netgalley.
Due to be released in English translation in September, this short novella tells the fictional story of the Ertl family. Ordinarily the story of Hans Ertl a former Nazi cinematographer who flees Germany after the war and exiles in Bolivia often going on expeditions in the Amazon rain forest would be enough of a story, but for this work it is only the beginning.
Told through several points of view we learn of the indoctrination and radicalization of Monika Ertl, the woman who will go on to become known as Che's avenger. I definitely recommend not only this short work, but also googling the main characters to make it come more alive.
My only grievance is it was way to short. I look forward to reading more by this author in the future.