DREAMING NICARAGUA: Jesse Pelletier is a Vietnam vet who runs a cheap hotel named Ospedjae Gringo Pinolero in San Juan del Sur, a beach town in southern Nicaragua. The year is 2000. Jesse’s previously-estranged daughter, Suzy, is visiting him for the first time; she falls for a local ecological activist, Camilo Sanchez, who promptly disappears. Or maybe he has been disappeared. But counterpointed with the realistic millenial material is an earlier imagined San Juan del Sur, in the 1850s, where another Jesse Pelletier, veteran of the Mexican War, has married a local girl and runs a hotel catering to the Gold Rush-bound passengers of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York-San Francisco steamship line. The parallel timeframes and intrigues and characters (including Mark Twain and the “Filibuster” chief, William Walker) echo off against each other as the tension rises.
DeWitt Henry, founding editor of Ploughshares writes: “In all, this is a full, rich novel, full of stories, full of characters, full of pleasures, and full of stylistic experimentation. The montage and collage does build to the epic, in Dos Passos’s sense. The range of voices is wonderful. The natural description is wonderful. At center, of course, is Jesse’s journey as poet and imaginative historian, as meditative seeker ‘for what will suffice.'”
Warner Berthoff of Harvard writes: “Drawing on an intimate knowledge of present-day Nicaragua and on a mastery of its checkered past as a target of North American imperialism, David Gullette has woven a compelling tapestry of Nicaragua’s beleaguered history. Past and present converge in a narrative that is both dramatically intense and historically accurate.”
To download Inez Hedges’ review of DREAMING NICARAGUA click here
To read David Willson’s review of DREAMING NICARAGUA click here
An excerpt from DREAMING NICARAGUA was published in Ploughshares (Fall 2008). All proceeds from the sale of the book benefit the Newton/San Juan del Sur Sister City Project (www.newtonsanjuan.org). To order a copy, send a check (preferred method) for $18.50 (which includes shipping and handling) to: Fenway Press, 68 Pembroke St. Newton, MA 02458, or use PAYPAL below (if you feel you must). Sales tax for MA residents only.
NOTE: A “READER’S GUIDE TO DREAMING NICARAGUA” can be downloaded if you click here.
NOTE: To read “outtakes” (interesting sections of the book that were brutally excised in the Final Cut) go to “Dreaming Nicaragua Outtakes.”
Fenway Press 
David,
This is a wonderful project. I just put a check in an envelope I will send out in the morning for my copy of Dreaming Nicaragua. Congratulations on finishing the book and establishing an independent press. I’m looking forward to reading stories written and printed by one of my favorite cousins.
Love,
Nina
Thank you for all the great things your nonprofit organization have done for SJD. I just ordered your new book and am so excited to get my hands on what should be a great read!!! very best JOHN
Mark Halliday writes:
DREAMING NICARAGUA is beautiful (or, as Devon has somehow learned to say in a hilarious Southern accent, “simply gawjus”) — glowing and solid and redolent with authority. I’m reading it fascinatedly. This is a novel by a writer steeped in Joyce’s ULYSSES — with such a texture of interwoven connections and references. I love the feeling that many things will gradually become more clear — like the sources of Jesse’s obsession with Nicaragua, and the backstory of his divorce from Anna, and the significance of the vignettes on pp. 16-17, and the question of whether Camilo is a good guy or not, and the question of the extent to which Suzy has grown up, and whether she can appreciate her father’s love, and the question of the disappearance of Maria Dolores’s son . . . And I haven’t even plunged into the 1850 plot yet!
Anne Tyler writes:
What a rich book you’ve written! I liked the fluid, apparently effortless way you moved between times and subjects; it gave me the feeling you were just pouring out what came to you. (Like the repetition of that line, “Well why don’t you just think about it at your leisure,” at the end of one chapter, looping us back in exactly the way that thoughts loop back in real life.)
Congratulations, and I hope the book is selling up a storm.
David comments: I hope Mark isn’t too frustrated if it turns out that in fact not everything becomes crystal clear as the novel progresses. After all, Nicaragua is (as Jesse says) a “certainty-challenged country.” I didn’t want to be perverse about my attitude toward the traditional satisfactions of narrative closure. I just think about Camilo’s mother, and the hundreds of other mothers of missing children elsewhere in Latin America, walking round and round in circles, holding placards containing not statements but (frequently unanswerable) questions, such as “Where Are They?”
There’s an interesting twist to this issue. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires–parents of kids who “were disappeared” during Argentina’s “dirty war” and whose grandchildren also disappeared, many of them secretly, unofficially “adopted” by military people–have recently been turning to DNA, which wasn’t available at the time of the first protests. Now these older ladies are approaching young adults, saying, “I think it’s possible you are my grandchild. Would you like to find out about that possibility?” Some say no; others yes. One such grandmother came to Simmons a few years ago, accompanied by her newly-discovered grand-daughter. It was very moving, like the last act of The Winter’s Tale. The lost child is found. Let’s hear it for science.
New comments from Mark Halliday:
“Wonderful scene where Jesse meets Caitlin Cuadra and has the long talk with her on her boat — wonderfully convincing and absorbing dialogue; great richness in the mutual revelations about each one’s past and sense of self; and there’s something refreshing and serious and kind of nourishing about a scene in which a woman and a man meet and talk so thoughtfully WITHOUT sex being the implicit issue between them.
Candidate for Most Beautifully Elaborated Sentence of the Year: “This means that all things flammable . . .” on p. 98.
Candidate for Most Delicious Sentence of the Year: “On the lip of the garbage drum at curbside two zanates point their beaks skyward and croon.” — p. 66.
Oh and very good moving and unsentimental scene between father and daughter on pp. 68-69.
I’m expecting some awful news about young Camilo.”
Stephen Chunlund (with whom I first traveled to Nicaragua many years ago) writes:
David Gullette has written a book which is an astonishing blend of history, politics and love story. Actually a four-level love story: of the daughter of the protagonist for a handsome young Nicaraguan; of the protagonist for his beloved Nicaragua; of the people of Nicaragua itself for their beautiful land, their birds, fish and food; and of the protagonist for a new love who finds him, separated from his former wife and lonely.
All four narratives are juicy with love of life, bloody with the tragedies that haunt human beings.
For example, Gullette has included excerpts from the “Jesse Pelletier Lexicon” which are definitions of words and phrases, mostly slang, which make a kind of window for us to begin to see and understand the people of Nicaragua. The fruits drip with the juices they hold. The birds and animals begin to prowl around us as we read of such treats as “the rendered and clarified fat of rattlesnake.” So we are taken way past the comfortable hotels and swimming pools of the tourist world into the stunning complexity of child-like good cheer, bitter longings and occasional violence which make the brilliant tapestry of real life in Nicaragua.
Gullette knows first hand about his subject having visited Nicaragua almost every year for many weeks at a time since the early 1980’s. He became a friend of Ernesto Cardinal Minister of Culture and father of Solentiname paintings and poetry. He has traveled to the small villages, working with the people to bring pure water to them with a simple system featuring a bicycle hook-up.
Gullette’s passion comes through in many ways including several run-on collections of words and phrases which plumb the depths of all his topics. The reader can almost feel him tremble as he slices open the fish, weeps with Jesse in the loneliness he wishes he could hide, writhes with frustration over the diminished dreams of the Sandanista revolution and longs for a good life for his daughter.
There are no cheap conclusions. Gullette is clear-eyed about the troubles facing Nicaragua: the harshness of the global economy, the destructiveness in the false hopes of the tourist industry and the surprises of the ways that the people themselves sometimes get in their own way.
This fine book is much more than a page-turner, though it is that. The way Gullette weaves in the real story of the first Jesse Pelletier with the Mark Twain encounters and the Vanderbilt ferocity is a brilliantly drawn reminder that we have walked these paths before. We are left wondering how we are now different, if at all, from those giants who walked the earth, built the Panama Canal and showed a staggering indifference to the life all around them. Dreaming Nicaragua is more than a dream, more than history, more than a poem of praise for the fruits of life, animal, vegetable and human, it is a gift from an extraordinarily talented author inviting us to walk with him through the jungles and wood houses, the fish and the surf, the children and lovers of a land few of us know, waiting to delight us and break our hearts.
Mark Halliday’s final comment:
“I finished DREAMING NICARAGUA today — all in all it turns out to be more deeply a novel about self-discovery, self-acceptance, and personal persistence than a novel about social injustice, though of course that is there in the scene surrounding Jesse. You certainly stayed true to your sense of Nicaragua as a land without certainties. Given that world, the maremoto, the death of Angel, the arrival of Mani, and the burial of the desconocido young man who has to represent Camilo, these things provide the only kind of rounding-out-of-story permissible.
It’s a muscular and memorable book, a labor of love in many palpable ways — love for the country, the people of San Juan del Sur, and for family, and for language, and for the idea of story; and for life in its crazy-loose-endedness. And I loved reading it.”
This is a book you can get immersed in. The feeling of being in the tropics is made very palpable and pleasurable. The rhythm of everyday life. Being a beloved outsider. It is quite dreamy. Then all the realities intrude, but gently. The pleasures get subverted by reality, but it is not heavy-handed. I learn a lot, but it is not didactic. There is a definite outlook, politically, but it is not blinded by ideology.
Penelope Cordish writes:
One of the things I got to do was read Dreaming Nicaragua with great pleasure and interest. I loved the historical novel writing within the novel, the two Jesses, and the two San Juan del Surs, the mixed genres, and cared about Jesse, believed in his voice. I’m glad he has the child and hope he wakes up and marries Socorro!
Don’t know if anyone will see this to reply. Do you ship to U.K. please???
Absolutely. $18 USD should handle it. Send payment and address in UK via PayPal or Buy Now button at the bottom of the page: https://fenwaypress.com/dreaming-nicaragua/