| Menendez: Best American Voice An ancient palm tree tells a woman to "listen to the sound of loss," as she spirals into madness after the death of her child, Ana Menendez's debut, the short story collection In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, illuminates a variety of losses in the lives of Cuban emigres to America. Cuba becomes a cup in the minds of her characters that holds all their dreams, desires, and despair, both real and imagined. Her stories make clear that we all have a Cuba, American-born or not: a place of what-ifs that we use to assuage or punish, remember or decieve ourselves. The New York Times named In Cuba a Notable Book of the Year when Grove published it in 2000. Now it has been released in paperback, further indication of its success. The title story, which won the Pushcart Prize and was anthologized in Best American Voices 2000, gets its name from a joke told by Maximo, a retired restaurant owner who now plays dominoes with friends in a paark where tourists gawk. A professor in Cuba before the revolution, Maximo's credentials are useless in America. He and his wife-"she of stately homes and multiple cooks"- opened a curbside food stand to feed sugar cane laborers. "Here in America," Maximo says, "I may be a short insignificant mutt, but in Cuba I was a German Shepherd." But the joke is a thin veil. "Sylistically," reports The Review of Contemporary Fiction, "Menendez's stories rance between realistic, linear narrative and unnerving magic realism." Publsihers Weekly syas her voice "falls somewhere between the slangy eloquence of Junot Diaz...and the lyrical exuberance of Sandra Cisneros." While not exactly magic realism, many of her stories navigate rich and wild interior lives. One woman's forgotten dream sudden soars like a blue parrot over the lights of Miami, "embraced by the stars." Another woman's despair blooms into red hibiscus flowers on the trunks of birches in winter, enticing her to her own death. Menendez's characterizations are always deeply and uniquely observant, as when she describes the happiness of one recent emigre as "more like gauze tha wrapped around her heart to keep it from spillng out"--revealing both the conflict inherent in many of our emotions and our ability to deceive ourselves. And while her storytelling techniqe is strong and direct, poetic moves like merged senses and contradiction punctuate the text here and there sending the mind for a pleasant leap in meaning; for example, one character "hears the beating of blue feathers in his chest," and the ancient palm "told me things she'd never said." Menendez, the daughter of Cuban exiles, worked as a journalist for six years with the Miami Herald and the Orange County Register in California. She is a graduate of New York University's creative writing program where she was a New York Times fellow, an honor awarded to only a few. She is currently working on a novel. --Lale Davidson
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| Wednesday, November 13, 2002 • 12:30pm-2:00pm • Library Auditorium • Crandall Library |
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| Acclaimed Novelist Colson Whitehead to Visit ACC Short listed for the Pulitzer Prize, Colson Whitehead's newest novel, John Henry Days, will astonish, and-no doubt-confuse readers. His first book, The Illusionist, was called, "the freshest radical allegory since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye," by Time magazine. Booklist compared his debut novel to the work of George Orwell, Kurt Vnneguut and Thomas Pynchon. But according to Maya Jaggi, a reviewer for London's Guardian, Whitehead has surpassed himself and "waded into epic" with John Henry Days. the novel layers the story of folk-hero, John Henry, who could drive steel faster than a steam engine, with the story of a modern journalist, J. Sutter, who is staging his own endurance competition to see how many consecutive events he can cover. While John Henry simultaneously meets his death and immortality during a competition, Sutter is running the risk of being consumed by pop culture. He sees his writing as merely an "electronic burp" that will "float up into the web marass, a little bubble of content he will never see." A disturbingly jaded character, Sutter's own near death experience sets a series of changes in motion. So what makes this novel confusing? Each chapter opens into the life of a different character, at different times, past, present and future. Best characterized as a post-structuralist novel, John Henry Days begins with letters that try to piece together the real foundation behind the John Henry legend and then bounces from character to character and genre to genre, from play writting to press releases. There is no clear chronological or narrative line. but the novel keeps returning to the sardonic Sutter, and traces his changes as he covers a celebration in West Virginia of a new John Henry postage stamp. We also return to John Henry's point of view long enought to learn that he had become as machine-like as his employer treats him, when he slings over he shoulder a screaming boy whose hands he's just smashed with a sledge hammer in an accident. Ths lends new meaning to John Henry's motive for beating the machine. The novel inmitates the disjointed and chaotic aspects of lifef, as if we were viewing a city from a bird's eye-view, or seeing into the windows of many unrelated people in the six-story apartment building across the street. But it also constantly underscores how we are all connected, sometimes by the most arbitrary events. And in affording us this multifaceted view, John Henry Days exposes American pop culture as a great unconscious, and often vicious, hydra, that sometimes demands - and gets - a blood sacrifice. This is particularly evident in the description of the famous Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway, where the Hell's Angels beat a black man to death in broad daylight while a crowd of peace-loving hippies looked on and the Stones sang, "Under My Thumb." In the end, though, what sets this novel apart from mainstream novels is its highly wrought style, for example: "In cities it is safe because there are no stars, the light from a million apartment windows provides protection: they reduce the night into a vast purple mediocrity shielding against higher thought." Not easy reading, but rewarding. A bounty of meanings and connections ripple out from each sentence. Newsweek said,"Plundering the past, eviscerating the present, John Henry Days is a feast for famished readers." Inspired to write by the Stephen King novels he read as a boy, this Harvard graduate and Village Voice writer told Salon.com that he developed good writing habits "from having to produce every other week and trying to make it fresh." --Lale Davidson
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| Thursday, October 10, 2002 • 12:30pm-2pm • Library Auditorium • Crandall Library |
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