After reviewing novels for 15 years and plotting my own, it's not often that a book surprises me, but Cleyvis Natera's Neruda on the Park is an astounding debut. The set-up reminded me of You've Got Mail: a naive young woman falls for the charming developer who threatens to destroy her world. However, as the beautiful cover art reveals, Neruda on the Park is more of a mother-daughter story than a romance, unless Nothar Park, their Dominican neighborhood in NYC, is the main love interest. What the story becomes is true to the multidimensional characters in our uncertain times but not what you'd expect from genre scaffolding.
Natera's novel has such a wonderful sense of place of both Manhattan (where I grew up) and the Dominican Republic (where I've visited). The generosity and rivalry of neighbors in a close knit community was well observed. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of food: "Pastel making started out as it always did - hours peeling skin, grinding the flesh of plátanos, yautias, and yuccas until the grainy yellow paste was smooth enough to be mistaken for cooked cornmeal." There's so much local flavor: from the decorative (not pandemic) masks celebrating Dominican Independence Day to the sidewalk barbecues with extra food to share, but crime, sexism, racism, and ICE lurk around the corner.
The book opens with commercial glitz: successful women wear designer suits with mortgageable shoes and dine in trendy restaurants. The power players, both black and white, live in private brownstones, where jewelry and books are displayed behind glass like trophies of social status. Double Ivy League educated herself, Luz Guerrero wants to grasp everything that is withheld from her. Her name in Spanish means light warrior, and she earns it, fighting for justice.
To please her doting parents and her mentor-boss, Luz works long hours as a corporate lawyer, pouring her savings into her parent's retirement home back in DR and buying designer clothes for herself on credit. After her career hits an unexpected setback, Luz meets a handsome billionaire in a hot yoga class (don't quit reading). Although white and privileged, Hudson apologizes for his mistakes, speaks better Spanish than hers, recites Pablo Neruda's poetry by heart, and welcomes Luz into his luxurious world without reservations. Hudson wants the best for her. So why does her mother hate him?
Halfway through the book, the seemingly predictable plot warps like a Dali clock, resetting our perception of reality. What I enjoyed the most was watching the characters develop and twist the storyline in unexpected directions, but I won't say any more to avoid spoilers. Except go pre-order this May 17th book from your local indie bookstore before it sells out. Publishing rights to Neruda on the Park sold at auction for all the right reasons. Will there be a movie?
My reviews of two more excellent novels by Dominican Americans:
Can you believe that today is the one-year anniversary of the global pandemic?
So much has changed in a year, thanks to vaccines!
On this day last year, my family was in Costa Rica celebrating my husband’s recovery from a health crisis. Although the hole in his heart was repaired as a child, Henry has remained immune compromised, and in 2019, he needed two more heart surgeries. In early March of 2020, his cardiologists declared the surgeries a success so our family foolishly flew abroad.
When we left for vacation, there was no COVID in Maine and only one case in Costa Rica. In our isolated cabin with more birds than people on the mountain trails, we felt safe enough until WHO declared a global pandemic. Our March 18th flight home was a terrifying chorus of coughing passengers on packed planes. I have not traveled farther than 30 minutes from home since then.
To protect Henry and other vulnerable people in our community, we have been living under strict quarantine for nearly a year. We get all our groceries curbside and restaurant food takeout. We only enter buildings for medical appointments, although my husband has a lot of those. I learned how to cut hair.
Our singer-songwriter daughter had to cancel her live concerts and move back home, but we haven’t seen our son since last summer nor our octogenarian parents in over a year.
Selfie from a solo walk last summer at the Eastern Prom in Portland, Maine.
Congratulations in Japanese to Henry's remote Bowdoin students.
We’re fortunate to have work we can do remotely. Henry exercises alone at dawn on remote trails, and I meet a masked friend for a walk once a month. Since high risk people aren’t prioritized in Maine, Henry won’t be eligible for the vaccine until April. Our extreme social isolation has a high psychological cost paid in tears and sleepless nights. Too many people have died.
Only vaccination will save our family and yours from this pandemic nightmare. We are so lucky that our country will have enough vaccine by May for every American. I have been following the medical research closely, and scientists agree that the vaccines are safe and effective. Vaccines have already defeated polio and small pox. For herd immunity, at least 70% of us need to be vaccinated to protect the community and to return to life as we remember it.
Celebrating Passover, Easter, and Hanami with my family in New York in 2019.
When I heard that my age group would be eligible next month, I scheduled my first dental cleaning in a year, and then I called my recently vaccinated parents. My writers’ group is planning an outdoor masked gathering for two weeks after vaccinations. I’m counting the months until I can safely fly to the Dominican Republic to research my novel about Jewish refugees during World War II.
While I wait, I’ve been learning Spanish remotely. I can’t wait for the day when we will only talk about la pandemia in the past tense and the COVID vaccine will be as routine as the flu shot. After vaccination, where do you want to travel?
This post was sponsored by Do Our Part in support of vaccinations in Maine.
This historical novel by Nobel Prize author Mario Vargas Llosa is absolutely brilliant in content, craft, and (dare I say) execution. The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del chivo en español, 2000) recounts the events leading to the 1961 assassination of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic for thirty-one brutal years. This political thriller not only describes what happened, but by getting inside the head of Trujillo and his assassins, we start to understand his motives and how an authoritarian leader can maintain control by psychological manipulation as much as by force.
Not only did Trujillo imprison, torture, and frequently murder any Dominican who opposed him, he was also responsible for the Parsley Massacre of 1937 that killed around 20,000 Haitian residents, including women and children. Trujillo escaped global condemnation by being the leader of the only country to welcome extra Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany (the subject of my work-in-progress).
It's one thing to abuse your enemies, but Trujillo was also cruel to his most loyal supporters, the Trujillistas. In return for prestige and wealth, he destroyed their integrity and dignity. He even slept with their wives and daughters. People tolerated his abuse in return for the economic prosperity and political autonomy that brought their country out of a near colonial relationship with the USA. All this is true.
Vargas Llosa's novel is told in three alternating points of view; only the first one is fictional. Urania, the daughter of a loyal minister, has returned to the island 35 years after Trujillo's death to confront the ghosts of her traumatic past. She's a 49-year-old successful lawyer who lives alone by choice in New York City. Vargas Llosa occasionally interrupts her third person limited point-of-view narration with a second person voice (you/tú) to balances her accusatory perspective, like a conflicted conscience. This shift in voice and sophisticated vocabulary made the book too difficult for me to read in the original Spanish so I switched to the excellent translation by Edith Grossman.
The second point-of-view is Trujillo on the final day of his life, reflecting back on his past glories and challenges. Vargas Llosa is at his best getting inside this Machiavellian mind. Trujillo is not interested in acquiring wealth beyond using it to maintain power to achieve his goals. He has a love-hate relationship with the USA: he credits being the strong leader he is to his training as a US Marine but would fight to the death should the Americans try to re-occupy his country. He wants to purge Haitians from the Dominican gene pool, and yet his grandmother was part Haitian, and he is attracted to mulata women. As an antagonist, Trujillo is multidimensional and well-developed, a most intriguing villain.
The final point of view is a chorus of assassins, all of them real people with mostly true backstories. These loyal supporters one-by-one turned on Trujillo. They are willing to sacrifice everything to regain their freedom. As they wait in a car to ambush Trujillo, they recall their past trajectories. Every assassin has a uniquely horrific story, and by sharing it, we learn about the history of the regime and the personal nature of Trujillo's control. El chivo/the goat was the popular nickname for their evil leader.
"Trujillo had also killed with a method that was slower and more perverse than when he had his prey shot, beaten to death, or fed to the sharks. He had killed him in stages, taking away his decency, his honor, his self-respect, his joy in living, his hopes and desires, turning him into a sack of bones tormented by the guilty conscience that had been destroying him gradually for so many years." (p90)
"...Trujillo había matado también, de manera más demorada y perversa que a los que liquidó a tiros, golpes o echándolos a los tiburones. A él lo mató por partes, quitándole la decencia, el honor, el respeto por sí mismo, la alegría de vivir, las esperanzas, los deseos, dejándolo convertido en un pellejo y unos huesos atormentados por esa mala conciencia que lo destruía a poquitos desde hacía tantos años." (p124, es más lírico en español.)
Read The Feast of the Goat to understand the danger of authoritarianism, a lesson all Americans need to learn right now. We cannot take democracy for granted. Also, this historical novel is fun to read, more like a political thriller than a textbook, but as full of facts. The author brings Trujillo back to life before killing him and destroying his legacy. I'd strongly recommend this book to everyone. I really want to see the film adaptation with Isabella Rossellini playing Urania!
Bruny Rivera, gracias por recomendarme leer esta novela maravillosa.
Greetings from snowy Maine!
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@Barrie Summy
In 1960 Julia Alvarez was ten-years-old when her family fled the Dominican Republic for the USA. The SIM military police had uncovered her father's involvement in a plot against General Trujillo's authoritarian regime. That same year in the DR, three of the four Mirabal sisters were murdered. Their deaths were made to look like an accident but everyone knew the truth. Those brave young women, code-named the Butterflies (las Mariposas in Spanish), were the beloved symbols of the resistance. Author Julia Alvarez reimagined their story in her gorgeous historical novel, In the Time of the Butterflies. Although the book was first published 26 year ago, this tale of a narcissistic dictator and the brave young women who dared to defy him feels all the more relevant today.
The story itself was compelling, but what made me fall in love with In the Time of the Butterflies were the well developed characters, the gorgeous writing, and the interesting narrative structure. The chapters alternate between the perspectives of the four sisters, following them from their privileged girlhood to a revolutionary adulthood under the tyranny of Trujillo's reign. Each voice was unique. The eldest sister was the most cautious due to her overbearing husband. The second sister was a dedicated revolutionary, who secretly suffered under the burden of heroic expectations. The third sister was motivated by religious passion and family loyalty. The baby sister disclosed too much in her diaries, admitting her infatuation with the revolutionary men more than the cause, making her delightfully human. Every reader could identify with one of the sisters. It felt so real and relatable, this focus on their family life and the villainy of Trujillo, more than on the polemic of the revolution. However, the trajectory of their tragic lives clearly illustrates the horrors of authoritarianism.
A Blue Morpho butterfly with shut wings is well camouflaged. The spots look like owl eyes to scare predators.
In the "Postscript," Julia Alvarez explains why she decided to reimagine the personal life of the sisters: "As for the sisters of legend, wrapped in superlatives and ascended into myth, they were also finally inaccessible to me. I realized, too, that such deification was dangerous, the same god-making impulse that had created our tyrant. And ironically, by making them myth, we lost the Mirabals once more, dismissing the challenge of their courage as impossible for us, ordinary men and women."
This might be the treacherous mountain range that the Mirabal sister crossed to reach Puerta Plata.
Read In the Time of the Butterflies to find the courage to fight for change and to remember how to feel hope for a brighter future. The Butterflies will remind you to appreciate family and democracy and to take nothing for granted. I read the book to research my own historical novel about Jewish refugees in the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, and I feel all the more inspired. To practice my Spanish I'm also reading Alvarez's children's delightful Tía Lola series, which I'd recommend to 8-12 year-olds in either English or Spanish. Alvarez is a master of her craft and one of my favorite authors.
¡Vivan las Mariposas!
The gorgeous Blue Morpho butterfly near the end of her short life.
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Inspired by her Dominican mother,Angie Cruz decided to write a realistic novel about immigration and assimilation. Dominicana is a quiet story of savory dishes, simmering passions, and the twisted bonds of family. Although this 2019 novel was written for adults, it would crossover well to teens.
In 1964 fifteen-year-old Ana Canción is wed to Juan Ruiz, a man more than twice her age. Her desperate family is struggling to make a living in the Dominican Republic. Juan and his charismatic brothers are working in New York but still operate a restaurant business back home. The brothers have an eye on the Canción farmland for expansion. Juan also wants a Dominican wife to start a family in New York City. Their homeland is in turmoil, and this union could bring both families more economic security and the salvation of chain migration.
Dutiful Ana pretends to be eighteen to fly to NYC. She arrives to shocking cold and isolation, unable to speak the language or to deal with city life. Her new husband is abusive and demands that she stay home alone, but Ana schemes to start a business and to learn English while Juan is back in the DR. And then there is Cesar, Juan's younger brother, who reminds her how to laugh again....
Dominicana's gorgeous cover caught my eye at Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick. I'm taking Spanish at Bowdoin College and reading Dominican American authors to research a new book. I started with nonfiction, but you can learn so much more about a culture by listening to its music, tasting its food, and reading its stories. Angie Cruz, Elizabeth Acevedo, and Junot Diaz have taught me slang I won't learn at school and a deeper appreciation of Dominican culture. They are phenomenal writers who create unforgettable characters in tough settings. Cruz's literary style with strong imagery evokes a sensory reaction. You don't just read Dominicana, you experience Ana's struggles as your own and hope for a better future. A deeply personal and realistic story such as this will engender empathy for immigrants and for victims of abuse or prejudice. I'd recommend this book to anyone.
Like Angie Cruz, a true family story inspired me to write historical fiction. During World War II my great grandfather, Arthur Lamport, helped to set up a farming settlement in the Dominican Republic for Jewish refugees. Other nations imposed strict quotas on Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, but the Dominicans opened their country to about 850 Jewish settlers. One small nation of only 1.5 million residents saved near three thousand more lives through visas. Most people, even other Jews, have never heard of Sosúa.
Last month I visited the Dominican Republic to practice Spanish and to see what remains of the Jewish settlement in Sosúa. I found a beautiful beach, their old synagogue, and more to share later.
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