Gioconda Belli--poet, novelist, society belle reborn as Sandinista comrade--has written a memoir of the Nicaraguan struggle that reads like a romance--a romance with politics and revolution, certainly, but most fatefully with men. The title itself suggests the dual nature of this memoir, both political and painfully personal: Though reminiscent of Eduardo Galeano's more heavy-handed Days and Nights of Love and War, Belli's tale is nothing if not intimate, even excessively so. Her country's epochal events form the colorful backdrop for her breathless and episodic recounting of her own journey of self-transformation. This is not for the squeamish: Sexual volcanoes will erupt, bodies will collide, sweat will drip from all pores, even at the exact moment the revolution triumphs in the streets. (How's that for climax?) But this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone familiar with Belli, "the unfairly beautiful poet," as Salman Rushdie wrote in his 1987 book The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, who "had created a kind of public love-poetry that came closer, I thought, to expressing the passion of Nicaragua than anything I had yet heard."

Of course, the Nicaraguan revolution, which finally toppled the Somoza regime in 1979 (more than forty years after the family's bitter rule was established), was in many ways, and famously, a poetic revolution, or a revolution of poets. The Sandinistas had the youthful enthusiasm of poets; their poets wore the idealism of revolutionaries on their sleeves, as proudly as their black-and-red scarves and army fatigues. (Belli, in fact, once showed up at a convention in Cuba wearing the familiar outfit of fatigues and boots, but with an eye-catching halter top--just one more sign, perhaps, of the contending facets of her revolution.) And that is what forms the heart of this memoir: the difficult trajectory of her romantic idealism, so uplifting at times, so all-consuming and delusional at others--and so damaging, ultimately, to those close to her, including her children.

But first, one needs to see the Sandinista movement in Belli's fresh eyes: Here was a thrilling hope for a new path in Nicaragua, so long under the shadow of the United States yet unwilling to follow the Eastern-bloc path of drab repression. As Belli writes, "We wanted a new kind of revolution that would be original and open, the product of a tropical, irreverent left-wing movement." It was a seductive vision, made all the more enticing by the poetry of its creators and converts, from Ernesto Cardenal to Sergio Ramírez to Belli herself. Rushdie, ever impressed on his short visit, quotes Belli's stirring poetry as his introduction to the enigma of Nicaragua. Those same lines serve as a perfect entry, too, into her memoir, and offer a clear picture of what is to come:

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