As someone who now lives far away from my region of birth, I find stories about characters returning to their origins especially poignant. In “A Little Luck” Mary Lohan returns to the Buenos Aires suburb of her early life after a twenty year absence. She has a new look, eye colour (with the aid of contacts) and name which is handy because she's desperate not to be recognized. Though she nominally goes for work she's also curious to reconnect with this place that she abruptly left under mysterious circumstances many years ago. This novel drew me in on multiple levels over the course of the story. Firstly, there's a compelling tension about what made Mary initially leave and what her relationship is with someone who recognizes her. This is enhanced by a short crucial scene from her earlier life which is described multiple times like a recurring nightmare. When the significance of this event is revealed it's truly shocking. Next there's the emotional connection I felt as we get Mary's full back story. It's truly heartbreaking and tragic as she was caught in a situation with no easy answers. And finally there's the larger meaning of the story which contemplates issues such as chance, the loyalty of family and the precarious nature of insular communities.

The circumstance Mary found herself in is so difficult because the choices she made are understandable but it led to a horrific accident. Because the community is wracked with grief it's easier to blame Mary and conspire against her rather than forgive her. It made me reflect on incidents from my own past which could have turned out very differently for better or worse. The story also asks a powerful question about how strong we are as individuals, as a family and as a community when we're tested by terrible circumstances. The relative success or failure of individuals is often due more to chance than willpower. Mary reflects how “Some mothers have all the luck; life never puts them to any kind of test. I only have a little luck.” It's poignant how the novel details how Mary's own mother was the victim of bad luck herself. Though she is severely tested, Mary also finds an opportunity to recreate herself with the help of another kind soul. While this story is centred around a tragedy it's beautiful how it also offers a hopeful message as she is able to survive the worst kind of loss.

Posted
AuthorEric Karl Anderson
CategoriesClaudia Pineiro
2 CommentsPost a comment

I can't think of another novel that has so deeply and intimately drawn me into the experience of someone living with a debilitating illness. Elena is in a late stage of Parkinson's disease where every physical action is timed around when her pills can be taken as these allow her a limited amount of movement. In the interim periods her body refuses to respond to messages from her brain and, even with the pills, normal actions which we take for granted are an enormous struggle. This is especially problematic as Elena is determined to visit someone on this day to call in an old debt. Her daughter Rita was recently found hanging in the belfry of a church. Elena doesn't accept the police's conclusion that it was a suicide and is determined to uncover the mystery behind her daughter's death. We follow her journey as she discovers the truth behind this tragic event and, in the process, get a profound insight into the challenges of her daily existence. However, this isn't a story that's as miserable as it sounds. Elena isn't the nicest person - often with good reason. She's irascible, extremely rude to some people and has a keen sense of irony. So following her thoughts and reflections is often a darkly funny and entertaining experience, but it's also very moving and enlightening. All these elements make this a riveting, revelatory and brilliantly imaginative story. 

Though Elena is only 64 years old she has the appearance of someone much older. She's unable to fully lift her head so that in the course of her journey our perspective of the world is limited to only what she can see. Usually this is people's shoes or the ground. This is one of the ways this narrative locks the reader so fully into her experience. At one point before her death, her daughter demanded she go to a beauty salon and, during the course of a pedicure, the beautician suggested she regularly use a cream on her feet. However, “she wasn't willing to add any more chores to the unending list of daily challenges: walking, eating, going to the bathroom, lying down, standing up, sitting in a chair, getting up from a chair, taking a pill that won't go down her throat because her head can't tip back, drinking from a straw, breathing. No, she definitely wasn't going to put calendula cream on her heels.” At almost every point in the story we're made aware of how all these necessary actions which most of us perform unconsciously require a big effort on her part because of the limitations her illness imposes. She comes to think of her disease as a separate entity in itself which she describes in the most disparaging and vicious terms like a hateful neighbour that has taken control and resides within her body.

There are so many lines in this book which made me attentive to aspects of physical existence which I normally don't consider. For instance, Elena observes how “She'd never had to think about her neck, about her eyebrows, to wonder whether they were muscles or flesh, or just skin, and she doesn't know what they are, but they hurt.” It's almost surreal how her illness makes her hyper-aware of things she hadn't previously considered so that her own body reveals itself as a foreign landscape. The story also gives an insight into the tremendous burden Elena's illness causes for the people around her. Before her death, Rita was Elena's full time carer assisting her with feeding, bathing, going to the bathroom and almost every daily action. This put an enormous mental, physical and financial strain on their relationship and Elena comments about how much they bickered. Rita also possessed some conservative values which caused conflicts and harm to people she encountered. I appreciated how the novel sympathetically shows the strenuous challenges Rita faced and the difficulty this caused in her relationship with her mother while also acknowledging her foibles at the same time. It's a tragic situation, but it's meaningful how Elena doesn't perceive herself as a victim and how she's committed to living though her illness has severely reduced the quality of her life. This is an example of a novel whose impact and meaning will continue to resonate with me for many years.

Posted
AuthorEric Karl Anderson
CategoriesClaudia Pineiro
3 CommentsPost a comment
Holiday Heart Margarita Garcia Robayo.jpg

Pablo and Lucía are Colombian immigrants who have established themselves in the US. They've been married for nineteen years and are raising adolescent twins Rosa and Tomás. Their relationship is extremely strained as they both grapple with ageing and their disillusionment with the American dream. While teacher Pablo is recovering from a heart condition he comes under scrutiny from his school in New Haven after the majority of his students make allegations against him. Meanwhile, Lucía has taken the children to her parents' holiday apartment in Miami and they spend placid but subtly-distempered days on the beach. In a series of alternating accounts between them we get a fascinating picture of a couple physically and emotionally divided. This is a perceptive and engaging novel about how the people closest to us can suddenly feel like strangers when we lose an understanding of ourselves and what we really desire.

Both Pablo and Lucía try to artistically articulate their points of view through writing rather than honestly communicating with each other. Pablo has been working on a novel for a long time and the way he goes about composing it is psychologically telling in regards to his understanding and expectations about Lucía: “an intelligent woman – like his character was supposed to be – would never leave her husband after so many years. She would prefer a miserable but stable life to the unpredictability of happiness.” Meanwhile, Lucía has also spent a long time trying to compose an article about gender and relationships which candidly reveals her frustrations with her family. She doesn't feel comfortable with the idea that a wife and mother should simply be caring and nurturing so purposely doesn't conform to the stereotype of a “good” mother: “The best thing she does for her family is fill their bellies with layers of cholesterol.” Equally, she finds no fulfilment in the tedious, time-consuming obligations which consume her days: “Her life was filled with important dinners that were completely pointless.”

It's moving and insightful the way in which Robayo writes about this couple who are uneasy in the roles they are expected to fulfil. Pablo is regressing to a kind of adolescent state by developing an inappropriate closeness to a student and fostering murky fantasies about returning to the homeland he's now estranged from. Lucía stubbornly asserts her independence, engages in a casual affair with a famous footballer and mostly passes the caring of her children onto Cindy, a maid and nanny who “came with the apartment.” While the title of the novel refers to a peculiar medical condition which Pablo suffers from it also describes the way adults try to take a break from the responsibilities of their lives - ones that they aren't sure they ever want to return to.

The novel also compellingly presents the complicated relationship this family has to race and nationality. While Pablo ponders themes for his novel and thinks about his job at the school he's idly aware of “The fear of wasting his life away in that building infested with minorities.” Meanwhile, Lucía looks with contempt upon the Russians she sees around the hotel and their son Tomás embarrassingly and loudly spouts racist statements such as “I don't like black people” on the beach. This probably reflects the resentment Pablo feels about different ways Latin American and African American people are treated in the US: “Being brown isn't an advantage, thinks Pablo – and he thinks about himself, his mothers and his sisters, even Lucía. Being black gets you further. A brown man is a watered-down man, stuck halfway between identities.”

It's bold how this story expresses the painful reality of never being able to fully integrate into American culture and how this arouses different prejudices. Yet, Lucía holds a different point of view feeling the nation one is born into isn't a defining factor of one's identity. At one point she angrily asks the rhetorical question: “Is anyone born with a flag tattooed on their neck?” The story movingly shows the many tensions engendered from self-consciously designating people into different “minorities”.

“Holiday Heart” brilliantly dramatises the disjunction between an idealized picture of life like sitting on a sunny beach and the reality of that life like getting sand caught in your teeth.

Posted
AuthorEric Karl Anderson
2 CommentsPost a comment

This is a novel with such an uplifting energy to it as it follows the adventures of a young woman caught in a time of bloody conflict and the formation of a modern nation. But it's also a clever and self-assured historical satire in the way it upturns patriarchal values in favour of those who are marginalized – especially female and queer individuals. “The Adventures of China Iron” feels like a comedy in the classic sense of beginning in tragic circumstances and ending with a joyous resolution. Set in Argentina during the political turbulence of 1872, the story concerns a journey of a heroine born into nothing; she is an orphan without a name, raised by a tyrannical woman and forced into marriage during her adolescence to the gaucho Martin Fierro, a heroic masculine figure from Argentine folklore. After giving birth to two sons she is cast aside by her famed husband and this is where the novel starts with this heroine establishing her own name as well as naming a stray dog who has become her only friend. She reclaims the name China from its dismissive/negative connotations (it's a Quechuan term for a lower-class girl or woman) and maintains her husband's surname of Iron, the English word for Fierro. From here she bands together with Liz, a Scottish woman travelling across country and Rosario, a cattle farmer searching for somewhere to set up with his herd. We follow their entertaining journey to find a home and establish a family that is “linked by more than bloodlines.”

It's great reading how China Iron becomes her own individual hacking off her hair and how this allows her to tread more easily between a masculine and feminine sensibility. I also found it moving the way she gradually establishes a sexual relationship with Liz to form emotional bonds and discover bodily pleasures which were previously denied to her. But one of the most powerful parts of her education comes in her new way of mentally mapping the world to understand the underlying national and economic conditions which result in social disparities. When drinking a cup of tea she comes to understand the “suffering that also travels in tea” and that in drinking it “we drink the broken back of the man bent double as he cuts the leaves, and the broken back of the man carrying them.”

This also informs what's happening in her own country especially when they come to stay with a Colonel who has basically enslaved a number of gauchos and tortures those who do not submit to the colonial powers. These are people whose labour is exploited because the attitude towards the gauchos is that “the only country they were going to get was the one they were building for the colonels and landowners”. Therefore it's no wonder that the narrative of Martin Fierro which depicts the abuse of the gauchos and their role in the country's independence from Spain was so desired by the people and he became a celebrated figure. But while doing so it also valorises a certain image of masculinity and relegates female participants like China to being little more than a footnote. So it's inventive how this novel rewrites this foundational text recasting the myth of Martin Fierro and how the epic poem came to be created.

I enjoyed how China's relationships with both Liz and Martin becomes more complex over the course of the story. But an issue I had was when China and her crew finally arrive at a community of Indians. The prose comes to feel so exaggerated in its lushness and overly romanticised. China believes that she becomes one of the Indians so much so that the narrative takes on a collective voice “we don't want to crush anything underfoot... Our rivers are alive and the streams are animals, they know that we live as one, that we only kill what we need to eat”. This idealized view of a community feels so over-the-top that it came across as ridiculously simplified when I'm sure the reality was much more nuanced and complex. I appreciate that the story was keeping to a more comic tone and it's refreshing to read a historical novel where queer individuals aren't fated to a life of misery or death. But, for me, the later part of the book undermines the power of the story thus far. Nevertheless, this novel is very clever in how it offers an alternative view of a nation's mythology and overall it's a very pleasurable read.

I bought this book several weeks ago but after far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil last week and I read author Julián Fuks’ powerful response in this Guardian article I felt prompted to prioritize reading his novel “Resistance”. It’s a very meditative story about the narrator’s reflections on his family history – in particular his adopted brother’s troubled life and his parents’ move from Argentina to Brazil after living under a tyrannical dictatorship. It felt ominously prescient when I came to the line “Dictatorships can come back, I know, and I also know that the arbitrariness, the oppressions, the suffering, exist in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of regimes, even when hordes of citizens march biennially to the ballot box”. But, of course, Fuks must have experienced and read about many shifts in leadership over the years to see how frighteningly quickly oppressive political leaderships can take control of a country. So yes, this is a novel about personal and political resistance to these tyrannical governments, but it’s more about a resistance to the categories and interpretations of history which diminish its reality.

The narrator struggles to describe his pressing concerns about his brother without stating this sibling was adopted. He’s anxious that just stating this fact will encourage all sorts of presumptions about why his brother grew into being a certain kind of man. This inner-conflict about giving details is echoed throughout the novel where the narrator questions both his memory and the meaning such information has in truly understanding the past and his family’s situation. It’s an anxiety I really understand and can relate to because of the way creating narratives necessarily means taking a certain slant on the past and it can impose limitations. This is especially true in families when a child or relative is defined in family stories as being a certain type of person. It perpetuates a certain understanding of them and can become a self-perpetuating thing which inhibits the freedom of an individual. The same is true when looking at the history of a country or a community of people who have lived through certain events. The narrator is just as reticent to define his parents’ political affiliations and the events which led to their defection from Argentina. This makes a compelling conflict that runs throughout the novel where the author not only questions the truth about the past, but about how it’s related.

Barely any names are used throughout the book and I think the narrator abstains from using them because of this same reason of not wanting to limit or define his family members. However, one character who is named is Martha Brea, a colleague of his mother's who is abruptly taken away in a car, executed and her body isn’t found until many years later. The narrator describes how “her absence lived in our house, and her absence lives in infinite circles around other unknown houses – the absences of many Marthas, different in their unrecovered remains, in their distorted features, in their silent ruins.” The novel describes the way many families experienced personal loss because of people who were “disappeared” for political reasons and the development of the famous movement by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo to recover children stolen under Argentine dictatorship. It’s powerful how the narrator considers the way his parents would have undoubtably been lost as well if they hadn’t taken the step to flee the country.

“Resistance” was a very different novel from what I was expecting but I was glad to be surprised by its deep thoughtfulness and philosophical quest to question the way we define family and history. Although the circumstances described are quite specific, Fuks’ unique methodology means the story takes on a much more universal meaning as the reader reflects on their own family and country. It certainly prompted me to rethink how I consider my own. In the coming years we’ll hopefully see many more strong Brazilian voices like Julián Fuks being heard and published as the country lives through this difficult period of time.

Posted
AuthorEric Karl Anderson
CategoriesJulián Fuks
4 CommentsPost a comment