Review of: Adios, Happy Homeland! by Ana Menendez
By: Brian C.
I think Jennifer Egan is the best writer alive. She’s the perfect blend of tenderness, boldness, and intelligence. She’s good enough to rightfully be called the proper heir to Eudora Welty. My harshest, and maybe only, critique of Egan is what she chooses to write about. Her two best loved works, Look at Me and A Visit from the Goon Squad, focus largely on super models and aging rock stars. Not subjects that would usually drive me to buy a book. But, she’s the best writer alive, so I love the books, and I love her, too. This is where my friend Lindsey can be heard screaming, “A PRIVATE EYE!!! WHAT!!” And she’d be right. But what if Egan could focus her subject matter on something that mattered more to me? Well, then she’d be almost perfect, and she’d be Ana Menendez.
Ana Menendez’ new collection of interconnected stories Adios, Happy Homeland is all over the map in the best possible way. With magic and nostalgia, the stories span multiple genres and generate various realities, while never taking their concentration too far away from Cuba. A wild ride through Cuban Literature, immigration, Politics, and language, the stories, every one substantially different from the last, build a birds nest of string and bark and sticks that can’t possibly fit together, but eventually do in the most comforting ways.
My favorite piece is the haunting “A Brief History of the Cuban Poets”. More a list than a story, Victoria O’Campo, the fictional writer who is the namesake of the Cuban intellectual, gives a brief history of those Cuban poets who have been persecuted, exiled, and murdered. This, apparently, happens a lot in Cuba. What shocks me, and what will keep me coming back to Menendez for inspiration, is the final paragraph of the story:
We end with the poet who was born in the poor countryside of Oriente in 1943. Like others before him, he was initially enamored of his oppressors. But his admiration soon wore off and he was harassed and imprisoned for various offenses against the empire of reason, including, but not limited to, a proclivity for writing poems on the leaves of innocent trees. In 1980, he managed to escape across the Straits in disguise. In 1990, in New York City, he took his life, still dreaming of returning to the sea (208).
I don’t understand how writers do this, or I should say how great writers do this. The comingling of Lawyerly language “…including, but not limited to, a proclivity…” with poetic sentimentality “…offenses against the empire of reason…” is so perfectly paced and crafted, that even after multiple readings, the paragraph holds its edge. That’s the charge of Literature and the joy of the literate. What a wonderful time to be a reader.
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For more on Ana Menendez, read her interview with The Rumpus.
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