Click, Clack, Click, Clack

“The Pancho Villa Underground Railroad,” by Johnny Hazard, 2015

This fiction book is set in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  It starts as a sort of anarchist / leftist travelogue about radicals moving around the U.S. attending protests, then travels into Mexico.  It bounces between Minneapolis events and Chihuahua (Villa territory) then Cuernavaca (Zapata territory).  It is written in a fragmented, episodic style that is frankly hard to follow.  Sort of a post-modernist impressionism doing inward-looking hipster riffs.  It name-drops various radicals, organizations, events and cultural references, including the legendary peasant revolutionary Villa who once invaded New Mexico for a short time.  It even mentions Minneapolis’ own Palmer’s Bar and May Day Books, as Hazard is a local author.

The Train is Waiting

The ostensible plot centers around a young woman, Iris, who plays some kind of role in anti-government bombings in Columbus, Ohio, then flees as a fugitive.   Left politics and direct action are atmospherics.  Feminism is an undercurrent.  The roiling Mexican left in Cuernavaca around the 9/11 attacks shows its roots in the proletariat.  It has fragmentary pictures of life in these Mexican cities, which some may like.

I have to be honest.  This book is almost unreadable.  It is like someone with ADD writing while on weed, jumping from thing to thing to thing.  Perhaps the author should try poetry.  I enjoyed the Minneapolis references, as anyone living here would do.  But without depth it just comes across as poetic slumming.

Other similar fiction reviewed below, use blog search box, upper left:  “Good News,” “The Bomb,” “Something in the Air,” “The Dispossesed,” “Peace, Love and Petrol Bombs,” “Palmer’s Bar.”

The Kulture Kommissar

August 11, 2019