The Gringa

January 15, 2020
The making of a freedom fighter--or a terrorist, depending on one's point of view. Altschul (Lady Lazarus, 2008) takes his storyline pretty much straight from the headlines, offering a fictionalized treatment of the case of Lori Berenson, the American activist who served a 20-year prison term in Peru for her affiliation with a revolutionary group. Just so, Leonora Gelb is a young Jewish woman from New Jersey who, inspired by a professor, travels to Peru to enlist in a revolutionary group headed by philosophers, a group that she insists is not a terrorist organization even if people all around it have a habit of dying. Leo, as everyone calls her (save those who call her "la gringa" or Comrade Linda), is naïve and fervent; a critical point in the narrative comes when she rejects her visiting father's offer to fly her home: "She won't be who they want her to be, who they'd raised her to be: an investment, they'd no doubt call it, one that's now in jeopardy." Years after her incarceration, writer Andres, another young American, travels to Lima, despairing of his country after 9/11: "I was a castaway, lost in Amurka: a country I didn't recognize, or didn't want to recognize." Tracking down Leo's story without ever meeting her save at one crucial turn, he concludes that she's much like him, someone who hates her country for the ill it does in the world. It takes Andres considerable time, as it does Leo, to discover that things are not always what they seem, that some people are to be trusted and others feared. When he does, Andres suffers the sad disillusionment of the one-time true believer, sure that his fate is to return home and take up a despised bourgeois life, his time in Peru "something I told at cocktail parties." Altschul's story is psychologically rich and closely observed, though it moves slowly, sometimes grindingly so, odd given the onrushing events he describes. A sensitive portrayal of the search for meaning in an unforgiving world.

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February 24, 2020
Altschul’s rousing and complex third novel (after Deus Ex Machina) follows an impassioned American who spends years in prison in Peru for her involvement with a group of revolutionaries. Inspired by the true story of late-20-century activist Lori Berenson, Altschul recasts Berenson as Leonora “Leo” Gelb, a Stanford student sick of capitalist America who travels to Lima in the 1990s to fight injustice. After witnessing the bulldozing of a shantytown by government forces and the arrests of protesters whom she later realizes have been forcibly disappeared, Leo falls in with the Cuarta Filosofía, Marxist insurgents for whom she leases a house that serves as the group’s headquarters. In 2008, 10 years after Leo’s imprisonment, her story is told by an ex-pat novelist named Andres, who’s been tasked with writing a profile of the “Gringa Terrorist” for a news website. As Andres chronicles Leo’s emotional trajectory into violent collaboration, imagining her angst and self-doubt, he begins to second-guess his efforts and confesses he’s made some things up. Blending historical details with literary allusions, Altschul successfully creates a postmodern, Cervantes-like labyrinth (“Everything is narrative,” one of Leo’s professors declares. “Thus, history is impossible”). Amid the clever games, Altschul’s stirring portrait of the strident yet earnest Leo poses a salient question about the value of personal sacrifice.

Starred review from February 1, 2020
Based on the life of Lori Berenson, an American sentenced to 20 years in prison for terrorist activities in Peru in the 1990s, Altschul's (Deus Ex Machina, 2011) latest novel challenges the boundaries between activism and insurrection, fiction and reality. Leonora Gelb leaves Stanford, dreams of law school, and perplexed parents behind to work in an ESL program in Lima, Peru. Soon Leo, as the locals call her, is living and working among the poor and disenchanted in a village where she intends to make a difference. Even when her adopted community is attacked and a close friend disappears, she denies that the revolutionaries she's taken up with are terrorists. As Leo fights for relevance in an increasingly hostile political landscape in which philosophers punish the wealthy and rescue the disadvantaged, she finds herself at the fore of a movement and eventually on trial. Leo's story is fitfully revealed by Andres, an American journalist whose editor demands a salacious profile that paints Leo as a lifelong radical. But the deeper Andres delves into Leo's story, the more he questions her cause, not to mention his faith in American ideals. Altschul's ambitious and culturally aware novel is a captivating depiction of passion, disenchantment, and hope gone violently awry.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)