A father-in-law dies. A mother dies. A husband takes ill. The Cruel Country, by Judith Ortiz Cofer is an amorphous meditation on all this. Not a particularly uplifting book with which to start 2016.

Part way through The Cruel Country, I thought to myself Is this really necessary? Not that the book isn’t necessary to the author; with each word, you can feel how cathartic this memoir is for her, the ability to place all this in a narrative, however unsatisfying. But the book in relation to the reader: my father-in-law and mother are still alive, my husband isn’t sick. Ortiz Cofer’s words are going to be nothing more than a pale simulacrum until these things happen to me, in the same way that explaining motherhood to the childfree is a somewhat futile task. What can I say to an experience I haven’t lived through? Is it a failure of the words that I feel distanced from them? A failure of my own imagination? A failure of empathy? A failure of eliciting empathy? I can’t say. I can say that a few times the jumps between paragraphs fall flat, too quick transitions. I can say that there is some repetition, because of the repetitiveness of life, but that doesn’t mean I want to read it. I can say there is some unevenness, the story pushed into two books, one far longer than the other, so the second, dealing with the illness of her husband, feels more like a P.S. at the end, with the writing style and tone changing almost completely (less poetry, less Spanish).

I’ll say I loved the Spanish words sprinkled in. I’ll say I love, now and then, with the poetry. I’ll say I love this, this quote:

Ave María. Let me learn to relinquish her physical presence. Let her be the dew in the grass, the seed in teh rich black earth, the shade of the tree; let her be in the ephemeral bloom of the hibiscus plant … with flowers that fold unto themselves each night and are renewed each day.

I’ll think of that with my grandmother, who is the closest person I’ve lost, who was Catholic, and slightly foreign to my Protestant upbringing. I’ll think of her as I watch the little kids across the way tobogganing down their hill in the snow, almost a completely perpendicular image from the de afuera who lives in Georgia, USA, and comes to Puerto Rico to bury her mother.

Let me learn to relinquish; at least that I will take away from this book that I can barely even fathom.

The Cruel Country, by Judith Ortiz Cofer went on sale March 1, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Start the month with a hundred year old Austrian satire, end the month with a hundred year old French satire. Why not?

Not that I was really aware this was a satire before the opening page (The Vatican Cellars: An allegorical satire) told me. I ARC’d The Vatican Cellars because I read La Symphonie pastorale in high school, which is a story pretty much perpendicular to this one. I don’t recall La Symphonie pastorale as a romp. The Vatican Cellars is a romp. The satire here is definitely more subtle than in this month’s earlier Austrian satire (i.e. no Martians sweeping in at the end and blowing up the earth). I appreciated that, having the author think me a little bit clever. But I likely missed a lot of the Catholic jokes and I know I missed pretty much all the Freemason ones.

So we have our romp. There’s a whole intermingled family (three sisters, their husbands, an illegitimate child, the childhood friend of the illegitimate child, the girlfriend of the illegitimate child and his childhood friend (generally not at the same time, but maybe?), the sister of one of the husbands, the father of same husband, a childhood friend of another husband (who is in love with the sister his childhood friend married), a bunch of the kids of various sisters and husbands); part way through I felt like I needed one of those family trees found in the front of heavy Russian novels. Then I sorted myself out and continued. The main narrative thrust, at least the one that gets most of the family from France to Italy, is a sort of 419/Nigerian-Prince scam, where you roll your eyes at the characters who can’t seem to see how ridiculous the whole thing is, en courant comme des canards sans tête. There’s the proto-nihilism and a crime that one could attribute, retroactively, to Mersault. There’s a bunch of pious characters ignoring taboos (extra-marital affairs! incest! blasphemy!). There’s a dragging of the last twenty pages or so as some of the machinations are revealed to some of the characters and then …

And then the story simply stops. Bam. Like a wall and we’re in the endnotes and afterword.

Um, okay.

The afterward tries to suggest that the abruptness is again a manner of playing with preconceptions, i.e. where is the happy ending, or the comeuppance or the return to moral rectitude? Nowhere! Because I, André Gide, am trying to fuck with your idea of how stories like this should end. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Ha?

So the book was funny and engaging and then it started to slog and then it finished. The End.

But I will mention that The Vatican Cellars is not at all like La Symphonie pastorale, which is more what I was expecting because I never read the blurbs on Netgalley maybe as closely as I should have?

See the kind of wacky verb-tenses in that past sentence? There’s a lot of verb-tense changes The Vatican Cellars. I suppose they are from the original text and not the translation, but they pull me out of the story. Also the narrator who likes to talk to the reader now and then, I think to remind us that André Gide is somewhere watching us. Then the translation, which the introduction assures me has been modernized for today’s reader, veers between describing something as looking gross (at least it wasn’t gnarly) then using words like bumf, which is apparently British slang, no idea if that’s contemporary or not. I’m glad my kobo has a dictionary for me to look these words up in. Ending a review like this, without any real sort of conclusion may seem a bit odd, but think of it this way, I am trying to fuck with your idea of how reviews like this should end. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Ha?

The Vatican Cellars, by André Gide, a new translation by Julian Evans, went on sale August 11, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.