Book review: ‘The Accountant’s Story,’ a tale about narco baron Pablo Escobar, by his brother
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
If you speak a little Spanish and recently have spent a bit of time anywhere near the border, you’ve probably heard a narcocorrido, a ballad sung to danceable norteño-style music with lyrics that romanticize the drug trade, writes Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times book section.
Rutten writes that ‘The Accountant’s Story: Inside the Violent World of the Medellín Cartel’ is the literary equivalent of a narcocorrido -- ‘without the redeeming virtue of a catchy, polka-inflected beat.’
The book’s cover bears two additional subtitles: one informing us that this is ‘the true story of Pablo Escobar’; the other that the author, Roberto Escobar, is his brother.
But the reviewer is unimpressed with Escobar’s account of his brother’s cocaine empire which, according to Forbes magazine, accounted for 80% of the world’s cocaine traffic:
This oddly flat and, frankly, repellent book is certainly not confessional and is, in fact, less a memoir than it is an apologia for the brother Roberto quite obviously admires still. Pablo’s drift into criminality is, in his brother’s mind, at least, the inevitable consequence of growing up poor and ambitious in a violent, underdeveloped society. The fact that hundreds of thousands of other young men growing up in similar circumstances didn’t elect to better themselves by profiteering on misery and death is airily passed over; Pablo, after all, was ‘a born leader.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City