Articulo en la revista TIME sobre nuevo libro de Rosario Ferre.
Luis G. Garcia Iturrino
Once on This Island
Part family saga, part social history, a lush novel explores
the fertile landscape of Puerto Rico
By WALTER KIRN
Though American writers still try it now and then, if only to prove
how
impossible it's become, weaving a whole country's social history into
one great, multilayered novel is mostly a thing of the past in the
U.S.
What used to seem ambitious now seems arrogant--too many cultures,
too
many points of view. Elsewhere in the world, however, particularly
in smaller
countries where the political and the personal are more intimately
intertwined,
creating an epic of national identity still seems possible. A vital,
if daunting,
literary task.
This is just the task Rosario Ferre, one of Puerto Rico's leading novelists,
sets
for herself in Eccentric Neighborhoods (Farrar, Straus & Giroux;
340 pages;
$24), her second novel to be written in English. (Her first, The House
on the
Lagoon, was a 1996 finalist for the National Book Award.) The book
is a
panoramic landscape dominated by two great family trees, both with
deep
roots and broad, overlapping branches. The Vernets are earthy Cuban
immigrants, gung-ho, materialistic arrivistes out to make a fortune
and a
name. The Rivas de Santillanas are landed gentry, wistful, poetic denizens
of
Puerto Rico's preindustrial past. The island is large enough for both
clans, but
only just. As they grow, they crowd each other.
Eccentric Neighborhoods is nothing if not fertile, so dense with fables,
anecdotes, reminiscences and allegories that readers may find themselves
wishing for machetes to cut away the fictional undergrowth. As told
by Elvira
Vernet, the book's energetic, keen-eyed narrator, unlucky in love but
gifted in
perception, the stories of romance, betrayal and fortune seeking pile
up
gorgeously but shapelessly, like successive canopies of foliage. Still,
vague
patterns eventually show through. The brash Vernets grow steadily more
Americanized and politically influential as the old aristocracy wilts
away and
the downtrodden peasantry struggles along unchanged. By the end of
Elvira's
lush and tangled tale, even the tropical landscape has been transformed.
For
better or worse (Ferre leaves the island's future an open question),
greenbacks now grow where green hillsides used to be.
--By Walter Kirn
--
Saludos,
Luis G. Garcia Iturrino
lg...@home.com