What follows contains spoilers for the book, but the book is based on real events so they're sort of not spoilers. But I include this warning as the real life events were totally unknown to me.
Affections is based on the real life Ertl family. Hans Ertl was a Nazi propagandist and Leni Riefenstahl's cameraman. After the war, he moved his family to Bolivia, where his daughter Monika eventually became a socialist guerrilla fighter with the National Liberation Army. She is famous for having assassinated Roberto Quintanilla Pereira, Bolivian consul to Hamburg, and the person responsible for chopping off Che Guevara's hands. I imagine Monika Ertl is well known in some circles, but this was not a story I was at all familiar with, so I had no idea what was coming, although there were hints as to what Monika's future held early in the narrative. The story is told through the eyes of several different narrators who take turns chapter to chapter. Through snippets of stories told by her two sisters and two former lovers, we start to piece together how she became who she was. The most informative chapters are the two she narrates herself, but what we learn from the others helps fill in the picture. The book is quite short and the story so fascinating, I wished there was more of it.
