The Last Great Road Bum by Héctor Tobar
Though billed as a novel, this book is essentially the true story of a world traveler, vagabond, writer, and guerilla fighter in El Salvador’s bloody civil war named Joe Sanderson. Tobar spent more than a decade reading Sanderson’s journals and other writings and interviewing his family, friends, and fellow revolutionaries. Throughout the book, “Sanderson” playfully interrupts the narrative to correct Tobar on points of fact and call out places where he might be taking too much literary license. In writing this story of an American from the Midwest, Tobar, the son of Guatemalan immigrants, has created a book that is both a big, old-fashioned novel of adventure, personality, and daring-do, and a meditation on narrative authority. — Rico
