The narrative switches between first and third person. The key episodes of Che’s life-his childhood, his motorbike trip across Latin America with Alberto Granado, meeting Fidel Castro in Mexico, and scenes from the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath-are interspersed with his fateful (and fatal) campaign in Bolivia.
The text is a mixture of newspaper clippings, diary entries, invented dialogue, and literary flourishes. Clandestine editions and translations followed (this reviewer picked up a copy in Portuguese from a Lisbon street market in 2019), but never in English until now.Īs the subtitle states, Life of Che tells Guevara’s story impressionistically. It wasn’t until 1987 that the book was salvaged, in Spain, from a printed copy. In 1973, the military junta raided the publisher’s offices and destroyed all evidence of Vida del Che’s existence. The writer, Héctor Germán Oesterheld, courageously left his name on the jacket (and would later be “disappeared” by the government in 1977 at the age of 58). To secure the safety of everyone involved, Álvarez released the book under a fictional imprint called Ediko and offered to remove the author’s and artists’ names from the cover. At the time, Argentina was ruled by a military junta, so publishing a biography of a revolutionary in the form of a graphic novel was in itself a revolutionary act. As told in the afterword by Pablo Turnes, Vida del Che was first published in January 1969, two years after Guevara’s death, by Argentinian publisher Jorge Álvarez. The story of this book is almost as extraordinary as the story of Che Guevara’s life.
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