By Fionn Meade. Book Review.
The Seattle Times Special to.
Friday, June 15, 2001
James Joyce left his home city of Dublin for Paris, leaving behind a place
he had mapped and memorized exhaustively, but felt too confined by ever to go
back to. His defining collection of short stories, "Dubliners," was an
elegiac portrait of disappointed, reduced and sorrowful characters who would
never martial quite enough courage or imagination to leave the confines of the
city.
Cuban American Ana Menéndez has shed elegiac light on a group of
characters that did flee their home, never to return. Yet, as her superb
collection of interweaving stories reveals, the exile community of Miami's
Little Havana portrayed in this debut work left much of their imagination and so
many of their dreams behind.
In the title story, Maximo is an old man who entertains his playing buddies
at Domino Park with jokes while tourists snap quaint photos. But he is also a
former professor whose punch lines are suffused with distance, melancholy and
rancor. "Here in America, I may be a short, insignificant mutt, but in Cuba
I was a German shepherd." Indeed, everyone's stories in this community of
reparation and longing trail off into nostalgia - or sputter with anger.
Menéndez links the 11 stories, as a central character such as Maximo
appears at a party in a later story or behind the counter at a local restaurant
in still another. It is, however, a steadfast devotion to the past that truly
connects the stories. Regardless of age, or whether the Cuban Revolution was
experienced firsthand or simply through family memories, the specter of a lost
idyll haunts each story: elegant homes turned in for back yards choked by banana
trees and bluer skies, dreams of becoming Marlene Dietrich, Joe DiMaggio or
Frank Sinatra replaced by waitressing, banking, cooking and, above all,
recounting lives deferred.
Isolation seems to flower in the heart of each character as some sort of
consoling force, pushing away reality in favor of something adrift.
In "Hurricane Stories," a woman recounts her childhood memories of
the impending hurricane of 1972 to her doubtful lover and her father's
exaggerated tales of "the storm of '37." "Day after day, I burden
my flat Florida childhood with meaning ... and suddenly there is so much more I
want to tell him. About waiting and the rain. That my father was going to be a
grand singer and my mother was beautiful. I want to tell him how our first year
in Miami, my parents spoke only in gestures, all sound gone out of our lives
like air."
The inability to forget a supposedly better, more colorful way of life
echoes obstinately through three generations. And yet, just as one character
pines for the fleeting past, another seeks to disavow it. Of a former dissident
who has finally left Cuba 30 years after the revolution, the author writes in "The
Party": "Ernesto is weary of language, weary of words and the memories
they trap and kill for viewing. ... He thinks now, old as he's become, that he
would like to welcome blankness, to live in a white house with white walls and
white floors. He would banish film and photographs, everything that dulls the
moment with yesterday's light."
The story "Miami Relatives" and its understanding of Cuban exiles'
intimate relationship with Fidel Castro is worth the price of the book alone.
The community that emerges in these pages is one of humor, acute grief and
gifted storytelling.
Ana Menéndez will read from "In Cuba I was a German Shepherd"
at 7:30 p.m. tonight at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., Seattle.
Information: 206-624-6600.
Copyright © 2001 The Seattle Times Company
"In
Cuba I was a German Shepherd" / Ana Menéndez |