There is nothing quite like fiction to grasp the true nature of an oppressive regime. Novels allow us to witness the effect of oppression on the day-to-day activities of ordinary people, and on their often failed attempts to enjoy some sort of private life in the face of the regime’s intrusions ... The Last Days of el Comandante is...enthralling...revelatory...with its skilfully wrought atmosphere of suspense and energetic prose, well translated by Rosalind Harvey.

Mr. Tyszka is a versatile writer who merits wider attention...blending brisk, ironic parables with dryly disenchanted commentary. This novel is, on balance, more analytic than aesthetic (the translation, by Rosalind Harvey and Jessie Mendez Sayer, is clear and straightforward), valuable especially for Sanabria’s insights into the destructively politicized nature of Chávez’s death.

In sum, the novel’s English translation does a devastating job of portraying the almost magical power that a single, charismatic leader can hold over a country and its people, becoming in essence a talisman that enables people to ignore reality in favor of a blind faith that things are indeed going to get better ... The Last Days of El Comandante will be a riveting, tragic read for those who are well versed in authors from Borges to Poniatowska, as well as those who are new to Latin American literature in general ... the novel’s intimate portrayal of a country’s slow shattering will resonate globally in its exploration of how people struggle to deal with violence, desperation, hope, and fear, as events drag them into an unthinkable future.

The stories Barrera Tyszka presents offer a solid slice of the uncertainty of Venezuelan life of the time, the basic plot-lines of each offering a great deal of potential ,,, But it's a lot to juggle in a relatively short space, and most of the storylines feel rather thin, Barrera Tyszka eliding over periods of time and only sketching many of the characters, or allowing them to slip from view too often and for too long. There are times, when he takes his time, that the narrative impresses, but almost each of these storylines also gets short shrift some (or much) of the time; admirably, Barrera Tyszka mostly avoids sheer shock value—but given the (realistic) almost anticlimactic resolutions to much that happens (including Chávez's death, which readers of course knew was coming) these stories need more elaboration; as is, they feel slighter, less attended to than they should. The Last Days of El Comandante does offer an interesting glimpse of Venezuela at the time of Chávez's death, and hints of the odd (but, sadly, hardly uncommon) phenomenon of a personality—rather than substance—dominating a nation's politics (and, predictably, running the country into the ground). Barrera Tyszka is particularly good on the everyda—and also on the odd Cuban connection and the complex interplay between Cuban (national and personal) interests and Venezuelan ones at the time. But one wishes this were presented as a much bigger saga—or that Barrera Tyszka had focused more tightly one or another of his (too-)many storylines.