February 12, 2007
“Paradise Travel”
Jorge Franco
Translated by Katherine Silver
Picador
$14 (paperback)
228 pp.
The immigration debate is still inching along in Washington, “Babel” snagged a Golden Globe for best picture, and Lou Dobbs continues to rail against outsourcing and NAFTA on television, seven nights a week. The moment is ripe for a novel about border-crossing and illegal immigration. And Picador was either prescient or just lucky in choosing to release the English translation of Colombian author Jorge Franco’s 2001 novel, “Paradise Travel,” this winter.
Like the makers of films like “Babel,” Franco builds his story of a young Colombian couple who escape to and then from New York, through a scattering of flashbacks, though his telling is somewhat less convoluted than theirs is.
“Paradise Travel” refers to the agency in Colombia that Marlon Cruz and his girlfriend Reina hire to get them to the United States, after the embassy denies them visas. They know that Paradise Travel is really a coyote front, and that the journey will almost certainly be dangerous. But they are desperate enough to take the risks involved – Reina out of an innate restlessness and a general disgust with her country: its lack of opportunity, its rigid social stratification; and Marlon, who is more ambivalent about sneaking off – because he loves Reina and would probably follow her off a precipice and into a ravine.
But all of this is a build-up to a very unfortunate chain of events that happens almost as soon as they arrive in Queens. Marlon accidentally kills a police officer and while running from the scene, loses his way and most fatefully, Reina.
“Paradise Travel” refers to the agency in Colombia that Marlon Cruz and his girlfriend Reina hire to get them to the United States, after the embassy denies them visas. They know that Paradise Travel is really a coyote front, and that the journey will almost certainly be dangerous. But they are desperate enough to take the risks involved – Reina out of an innate restlessness and a general disgust with her country: its lack of opportunity, its rigid social stratification; and Marlon, who is more ambivalent about sneaking off – because he loves Reina and would probably follow her off a precipice and into a ravine.
But all of this is a build-up to a very unfortunate chain of events that happens almost as soon as they arrive in Queens. Marlon accidentally kills a police officer and while running from the scene, loses his way and most fatefully, Reina.
He is lost in a city he doesn’t know how to navigate, a city he can’t communicate in, and where he suddenly finds himself homeless.
Despite some clunky metaphors and plot devices (the city as a beast, its infrastructure as the guts; giving Reina different colored eyes to underscore her dual nature as loyal nurturer and striving opportunist; and some overblown scenes, like one in which Marlon has a temporary breakdown in the face of his new circumstances) “Paradise” has an emotional center that rings true, and in Marlon Cruz, a main character who is endearing and easy to empathize with.
Jorge Franco is a self-proclaimed member of the McOndo school of fiction, which takes its name from Gabriel García Márquez's fictional town, “Macondo.” These writers avoid the fantastical images and accompanying political themes made famous by García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and their peers. There are no beatific heroes with golden butterflies flying out of their mouths as revolutionary forces knock down village walls, in their books. They are social realists who chronicle a segment of Latin America that is much lesser-known in the first world, the middle class.
Yet there is something vaguely metaphysical to “Paradise.” Reina is elusive even when she’s right in front of Marlon. She is the reason he is New York, yet she is nowhere to be found.
She proves to be both his reason for living and the bane of his existence. And with time, though he remains stubbornly loyal to her, refusing to give up his search, he comes to feel tricked by her, in a way.
Orlando Tobón, a real-life fixer of sorts, for immigrants in Jackson Heights (and who played a character based on himself in “Maria Full of Grace”), appears in the book by name; it’s a minor distraction that pulls the reader out of Franco’s fictional world momentarily.
It’s more than a stretch that even an undocumented alien could just flee the scene of an accident with a dead cop in his wake and roam freely inside the country for so long. (The story takes place over about a year, and Franco never goes back to resolve the incident.) And the ending is really a question mark that borders on unsatisfying.
It’s also hard to say whether knowing beforehand that the book is a translation is really to blame, but the prose is choppy at times.
Despite its flaws though, the story underscores the personal networks that people take for granted when they’re home, and how terrifying it can be to exist without a net, especially in New York, and especially for a foreigner. Marlon’s good fortune and his undying hope aside, it’s likely that the prototypical immigrant who comes with visions of gold-paved streets would come back in a sequel as a cynic. But it’s hard to imagine Marlon Cruz like that.
-- Matt Elzweig
No comments:
Post a Comment