I bet I am not the only one who never read a book inspired by Puerto Rico´s social and political recent history. The brilliantly written debut novel by Xochitl Gonzalez - herself from a family with its own story of militantism - Olga Dies Dreaming is my first introduction to a topic which remains of actuality.
Olga and her brother, Prieto, are case story of successful American dream: an unnamed Ivy League graduate, she is a successful wedding planner, the ´Puerto Rican Martha Stewart´. Her brother is a local politician. But there are cracks into the picture perfect dream: Olga struggles with relationships and somehow got involved in a money laundering scheme of the Russian mafia. Prieto is divorced, gay in the closet and about to come out and recently HIV positive, blackmail by greedy real estate developers (hopefully not all real estate developers are sharks and there is a character in the book who may prove otherwise). Their mother, Blanca, left them when they were children to fight for the independence of Puerto Rico and keeps sending them self-righteous letters written in a revolutionary vein. Their father was a Vietnam war veteran who died of AIDS.
An outstanding feature of the book is the relatively balanced representation of the characters. They are multi-dimensional, complex, changing their mind during the story, making choices. They think and reflect.
The book may be considered as a literary application of the intersectionalist theory. Although in non-fiction such an approach may be very useful in understanding better the multiplicity of layers of a topic, in literature it raises significant challenges. The nastiest risk is to end up turning a narrative into an ideologically centered piece of work, to turn the story automatically biased and therefore, beyond the good and evil of creativity.
For instance, at the very beginning of the story, Olga has an inner monologue about beautiful wedding napkins as a status and class and money symbol. The idea is not bad, but it sounds very propagandistic and although capitalism is not (always) great, there are ways to show it without such an intermezzo. Also, the mother´s letters although they make sense as discourses, they are like copy pasted from some boring manifesto and sounds like a robot.
Such story switches from fiction to nonfictional messages do damage the story in my opinion and belittle the literary potential. Featuring gently ideological struggles in literature is not an easy task though and forcing up either a direction (literary) or another (ideologically) is easier than trying to keep a right balance between the two. The Patriots does it admirably and as for now, remains my favorite books featuring revolutionary mothers.
Olga Dies Dreaming is an interesting literary experiment and the prose as the strory construction promise - hopefully - future better books by Xochitl Gonzalez. The characters particularly are very dense and the dynamic between them is well pondered. Particularly the relationship between Olga and her brother are very special and one of the things I loved the most about this book.
Rating: 3 stars
Disclaimer: E-book offered from the publisher, but the opinions are, as usual, my own
No comments:
Post a Comment