The Latin Wakes

The Latin Wakes a novel by Ernesto Yale-Vera, Ph.D.Psy., MLitt. (c) Ernesto Yale The Latin Wakes brings candlelight into obscure South American stories. In the narrator's mind field, a mix of Western and Amerindian, fact and fiction, personal and national create an interference of beams that form a hologram that he takes for reality. In the novel, humans, robots programmed and carried by history, can enjoy some freedom if they ride on history's road in balance instead of resisting it in vain. Phantoms regarded as immaterial, though more destructive than anything material, cause most of our fatal falls from the conveying road, despite a poet's clamoring: "Wayfarer, there is no road, / only wakes upon the sea," denying the very existence of the road. The novel evolves from the narrator's postcolonial world, in close relation with a seeming goddess incarnation, through the HOPE charitable organization and studies in Arkansas, to Mexico City, Quito and Prague. His experiences at a student hostel and at the Chinese embassy in the Czechoslovak capital, while begging for a scholarship in the midst of the Sino-Soviet split, warm up dark corners of the cold war and bring him to the brink of insanity...