Mi hermano y yo
Carlitos and I walked under a light bajareque, pin-prick drops, light as the flight of a bird to a branch. He'd driven me to the camposanto in Panama City where mami and papi and the tíos and tías who'd populated our lives had been laid to rest.
It was the end of the rainy season. The grounds were mottled green and gold, the pillowy grass, soft under our feet. Every step or two we came upon stone and bronze markers. Julita Maduro Cardoze. Emily D. Maduro. Tía Elena who always wore a fedora to set off the family's oval imprint of her face. It was easy to imagine that these members of a family—so close in life—would be pleased to be reunited in this peaceful afterworld bounded by lxora hedges with orange and yellow flowers peeking through stiff and glossy leaves. The rain began to thicken. My brother walked to the car and pulled an oversized red umbrella from the trunk.
Swimming lean, open gaze, he said, I've volunteered to clean the dead before burial. He spoke very softly, angled his head. It's called Tahara, that's the Hebrew word; it's a ritual of purification in Jewish practice. Like a baby that is washed when he is born.
Carlitos and I continued on our walk, our heads almost touching under the red umbrella.
The Apology by Jimin Han (Little, Brown and Company)
A gifted writing teacher and writer, Jimin Han is also author of A Small Revolution.
Jimin Han, dear mentor and friend, has written a multigenerational Korean family story told by 105-year-old Hak Jeonga that in large part takes place in a transition world between the living and the dead. Jeonga is stubborn and proud—and terrifically funny—unwilling to leave the afterlife until she fixes her mistakes with the living.
The Apology has been reviewed beautifully everywhere! NYTimes:The Short List I want to add here my sense of wonder and admiration at the enormous chances Jimin Han took by killing her protagonist in the first two pages (hit by a bus!) and giving us a work of such wisdom, nuance about family and sisterhood—and a newly invented afterlife where I wouldn't mind traveling some day, checking in on my loved ones to make sure they are safe.
From The Making of a Writer, a conversation with Jimin some months ago here on these pages:
"An exercise I do with my students is to write about a time when they felt powerless. They can write about a dentist's office. They can write about anything. Then I ask them to change the outcome. If they were afraid, I as them to make themselves suddenly able to overcome that fear and take action.
"The Apology comes out of that feeling. I had written parts of the story before, but I didn't have the overall idea for it. Then in 2020, like everyone, I was worried about Covid, afraid of death, still mourning my mother who died in 2016. So I wrote about a woman who died.
"What's the worst thing that could happen? That she died and her story continued in the afterlife, still trying, not limited by death. So I pushed it. I allowed the character to do these things.
"I made the protagonist one hundred and five years old. You're allowed to be larger than life if you live that long."
The Apartment by Ana Menéndez (Counterpoint Press)
"History seems like a big thing to those outside of it. But it is experienced in miniature, a boat's humid hold, a creased passport, a small suitcase full of papers dragged from city to city. So much lost between languages...."
Cuban American writer, poet, and journalist, Ana Menéndez has written a beautiful novel about exile and displacement. She holds us to the peephole, into the lives of tenants in a single unit in a South Miami Beach apartment. The tenants, transient, are global exiles: A concert pianist who now plays piano at a senior facility, a man waiting on a green-card marriage, a general-in-hiding, wives, soldiers, sons.
A term often attributed to works in Latin American literature is magical realism, used when the work is grounded in the real world but has fantastical elements that are considered normal.
Apartment 2B in the Helena becomes a witness to the lives of its tenants. Rhythmic, musical, alive, the apartment recovers between tenants, the damaged floor in the kitchen sinks, roaches scurry, the air conditioner cycles. A tenant ghost is caught in a kind of purgatory within the walls of the apartment, longing to make contact with the living. There can be second chances. We are one another's saviors.
This poetic book leaves us open, fragile, questioning.
Some books with elements of magical realism— works by Jorge Luis Borges, García Marquez - Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Laura Esquivel - Como Agua Para Chocolate (Like Water For Chocolate), Toni Morrison - Beloved, Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities. Set in an almost entirely otherworldly spirit world - George Saunders - Lincoln and the Bardo.
Anything is possible in literature.
As always, I’d love your thoughts. As always, this is a conversation.
The books you've described sound like the kind I like to read. I trust your judgment, Marlena. I also enjoyed the scene with your brother—oh the details: the colors, the rain, the pillowy grass, the dead. I'm lured in.
A wonderful post, Marlena. Love how you gave us the story of you and your brother, in the cemetery, which then sets the tone for your excellent book review of The Apology. Beautiful!