Recent Reviews
Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Review published in the San Francisco Examiner on September 9, 2018
http://www.sfexaminer.com/tag/fruit-of-the-drunken-tree/
Fruit of the Drunken Tree is a riveting new novel by talented Bay Area writer, Ingrid Rojas Contreras. It is a powerful and disturbing coming-of-age story set in the Bogotá, Colombia of the 1990s. The book describes the intersecting lives of two young girls, one affluent, one poor, trying to grow up as a cyclone of escalating violence engulfs them. Kidnappings, assassinations, car bombs and the pursuit of Pablo Escobar punctuate their daily lives. The book is ultimately a tale of emotional resilience, as these children come to terms with the frightening disintegration of civil order.
Seven-year-old Chula Santiago lives in Bogotá with her nine-year-old sister Cassandra and her mother and father, Alma and Antonio. Inside her guarded community, Chula lives in comfort, plays with dolls and watches Mexican soap operas. But the threat of violence hovers all around. Anxiety is her constant companion. She tells us early on, “Most people we knew got kidnapped in the routine way: at the hands of guerrillas, held at ransom and then returned, or disappeared.”
Chula’s father works for an American oil company and is often away from home. Chula’s mother hires thirteen-year-old girl, Petrona Sánchez, as a maid. Petrona lives in abject poverty in an invasión, a slum on the outskirts of Bogotá. Her mattress rests on a dirt floor, there is no running water and food is scarce. A paramilitary group had kidnapped her father and older brothers and torched the family’s farmhouse. Petrona now provides for her mother and remaining siblings as best she can.
The narration of the novel rotates back and forth between Chula and Petrona as they absorb each new event in this dystopian world. The girls attempt to learn the names of a bewildering array of drug lords and guerrilla groups. A confused Chula says, “…I couldn’t grasp the simplest of concepts—what was the difference between the guerrillas and the paramilitary? What was a communist? Who was each group fighting?” The girls are living in a war zone. When Petrona becomes involved with a young man who has joined a guerrilla group, Chula and the Santiago family are suddenly more vulnerable.
A foreboding sense of danger and death lurk on every page. As societal norms erode and the poor grow desperate, some people’s behavior become more depraved. The young girls attempt to make sense of the mayhem from their separate perspectives. When Pablo Escobar is captured, Chula’s sister says, “We can go to the movies! We can go out wherever we want now and we won’t have to fear being blow up!” Petrona views it very differently, “People like el Patrón where I’m from.”
Rojas Contreras masterfully places her fictional characters into the real historical events of that tragic time. Her language is rich and beautiful and she deepens our immersion by blending Spanish words and phrases into the story. Like an Isabelle Allende or Gabriel García Márquez novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree includes captivating moments of magical realism.
By the time the Santiagos flee Colombia, Chula has personally experienced many violent incidents. Not surprisingly, there is a severe psychological toll. Chula’s panic attacks increase and PTSD dominates her daily life. The Santiagos eventually liquidate their assets and leave Colombia for California. But, it is clear that no family member will be able to leave the trauma behind. Petrona has her own scars, but no such possibility of escape.
It is almost too painful to imagine children growing up in this environment, but all too many did. Rojas Contreras was one of them, a testament to her resilience and strength. Many of the events described in this heartbreaking novel are based on her own experience. She does not seek to assign blame for the chaos in Colombia; rather her impressive novel engenders empathy for the children who were robbed of their childhoods.
Family History by Dani Shapiro
A friend recommended that I add Dani Shapiro’s new book Inheritance to my reading list. The publication date is January of 2019. Since I had not read any of Shapiro’s prior works, I picked up her 2003 novel Family History and finished it in two days. This sad story took hold of me and didn’t let me go until the very last page. It is clear that Shapiro understands both the strength and vulnerability of family dynamics and knows how to convey that complexity in her writing.
From the first paragraph, we know something is not right. Rachel Jensen is in her bed watching old family videos in the middle of the day with the shades drawn. Her husband, Ned, has moved out, her teenage daughter Kate boards at a therapeutic school and her 2-year-old son, Josh, has some unspecified issue.
Rachel and Ned fell in love in their 20’s when they were both struggling artists in Greenwich Village. When Rachel becomes pregnant with Kate, they marry and move to the fictional town of Hawthorne, Massachusetts to live in a “fixer upper” near Ned’s parents. Using her art history degree, Rachel feels fulfilled restoring art for wealthy patrons and an occasional museum. Her family is her first commitment and the routines of their life make her feel peaceful and content. Ned enjoys teaching at the local private school and pursues his art when time allows. The family videos and memories show Kate as a happy young girl embraced by the love of her parents. It seems the Jensens have been enthusiastic and engaged parents delighting in Kate’s school activities and developmental milestones.
At 13, Kate goes to sleep away camp for the first time. She returns home with a tattoo, a belly piercing and an angry attitude. “We had missed her so much after all, and how here she was a strange sullen creature.” Rachel and Ned attribute this radical change in her personality to teenage angst. But Kate’s surly behavior escalates. She skips school and is caught shoplifting. As is often the case, she finds a new riskier friend group eager to push the boundaries. Compounding this tough time for Kate, Rachel becomes pregnant and Kate’s mood swings increase. When her baby brother Josh is born, Kate keeps her distance and becomes more sullen.
Soon Kate and Josh are involved in an accident that injures infant Josh. The family spirals out of control. Each family member feels fear, anger and sadness: a malignant dynamic emerges. Kate is scared and confused about her role in the accident and cuts herself. Rachel says, “She was a robot, systematically destroying herself and everyone around her.” The cascading series of events traumatizes everyone in the family and the solidity of the family structure crumbles.
If you’re interested in psychology and family dynamics "Family History" is a page-turner. Shapiro offers no conclusions as to what happened to Kate at camp, the night of the accident or what the trajectory of the Jensen family will be. It is up to the reader to discern. I wish there had been more clues of Kate’s impending implosion. But sometimes mental illness can just appear after dormancy in a child’s youth. It is hard to know when an adolescent rebellion has shifted into a mental health concern. Life can be heartbreaking and tragic. One can only hope that the Jensens’ receive the help they need to repair the damage and heal their emotional wounds.
A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr
Most people can recall the range of emotions connected to the most vivid or transformative moments of their lives. Falling in love, having a child, overcoming a seemingly insurmountable obstacle: these sacred moments seem to be stored in a different part of our brains. Occasionally, we retrieve these memories that transcend time and space to appreciate their significance in our lives.
In J. L. Carr’s quiet and powerful novel, A Month in the Country (1980 Booker Prize-Shortlist), we meet Tom Birkin, a young WWI veteran, who experiences his own transformative experience when he spends a month in the English countryside. Birkin’s psyche is damaged from his wartime experience. He stammers and stutters and the left side of his face twitches. His wife has left him for another man and he has no family with whom he can live. Rattled and traumatized by his role as a signal runner in the war, he takes a job restoring a 500-year old mural in a church in the little village of Oxgodby in northern England. Whatever religiosity he might have possessed has been obliterated by his wartime experience. Yet, he welcomes this opportunity to commune with art and pursue a paid professional project.
So in the summer of 1920, Tom arrives in Oxgodby where he feels grateful and reverent for the sounds, sights and smells of the countryside. Sensing his skittishness, the village people show him hospitality and respect, a stark contrast to the church authorities that provide him little warmth and the barest of accommodations. Tom’s daily routine is slow and steady like the novel itself. He works methodically scrubbing away the layers of paint on the mural while tending to the layers of his pain. Each morning, the sun pours down on the fields adjacent to the church and Carr’s descriptions make you feel as if you have been transported to the slow routines of this village.
Though this transformative time was both fragile and fleeting, Tom’s month restoring the historic mural etched itself deep into his psyche. The particulars of Tom’s current life we do not know. What we do know is that the experience gave him hope and confidence to keep on. And five decades later, Tom reflects with melancholy on his decision to leave Oxgodby. He says, “If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.”
This story is Birkin’s elegy and eulogy to the month in 1920 that healed his damaged soul. If we are lucky, we all have a time or place or a moment that we remember with a sense of sacredness. Carr’s book is beautifully written and inspiring to read in the relative quiet and peace of summertime. In our frenetic fast paced world, A Month in the Country is a perfect book for immersing oneself in a slower time and witnessing the possibilities of healing and transformation.
