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5.0 out of 5 stars
An Extraordinary Window, July 17, 2010
Havana-born author Cristina Garcia only occasionally addresses the issue of luck in a head-on fashion in her newest novel, A Handbook to Luck. More to the point, the entire book serves as a reminder of how one makes one's way in the world, regardless or in spite of luck.
Perhaps the most compelling feature of A Handbook to Luck is not what happens to the characters, but what doesn't : their lives are ordinary to a fault, and yet extraordinary for the window Garcia so gently opens into their lives.
Garcia, who recently appeared at the annual Border Book Festival in Mesilla, New Mexico, is one of the most popular contemporary Hispanic novelists writing today. Born in Cuba, she was raised in New York and currently lives in Los Angeles. Her first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, was nominated for a National Book Award, and she has won several writing fellowships since she began writing fiction in 1990. But she also has a Master's Degree in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University, and had originally intended to join the Foreign Service.
Known for putting forth a voice of Cuban exile that strays from the more recognizeable Miami-centric version, in A Handbook to Luck Garcia widens her repertoire with her heartfelt portrayals of the displaced and disoriented regardless of their homelands.
This engaging novel, Garcia's fourth, gracefully wraps the lives of three very separate young people as they grow into adulthood from the 1970s through the `90s.
Enrique Florit, son of a flamboyant Cuban magician relocated to Los Angeles and later, Las Vegas, presses his luck sometimes to extremes as he passes up studies at MIT for high-stakes poker for a while. He seems to amble forward into his life, constantly torn between his past and his future, eventually settling into the kind of family life that can only be appreciated with maturity.
Early in the book Enrique seems content to float with chance: "Chance intersecting with history and logic and reasonable expectations. Forbidden knowledge made visible, effaced and divine, as the gods busily issued disclaimers. In the end, everything was measured against mystery."
But on the occasion of a child's near-drowning in Enrique's swimming pool during a party as the book closes, he thinks otherwise.
"There was no convincing "why" to anything, no answers, just good luck or bad tilting life one way or another. Enrique didn't put faith in odds, or statistics, or reason anymore. Some things just couldn't be outrun. Odds might be calculated, inattention focused, reasoning torn apart. But luck, he thought, luck was something else entirely."
Before he makes it to that settled place, Enrique's path crosses in brief but tantalizing fashion with Leila Rezvani, daughter of a wealthy surgeon in Tehran, whose brief taste of American life slips through her fingers when her brilliant scientist husband decides to leave Los Alamost National Laboratory to return to their increasingly repressive homeland during Iran's war with Iraq.
Leila's virtual imprisonment as an ordinary woman in Iran, college-educated in America and now buried under her black chador, relegated to a spare closet while her husband and daughter (and occasionally her in-laws) enjoy opulent bedrooms, is as painful to the reader as it is vividly portrayed. Eventually Leila's memories of the kind of ordinary life she enjoyed in America, and the unmet promise of her encounter with Enrique, are impossible to reconcile with contemporary life in Iran. Her story, so easily true-to-life, is heartbreaking.
"One bomb had leveled an apartment building in Leila's father's neighborhood. ... A week after the attack, their dog, Zozo, who'd been lost on a trip to the mountains, reappeared. Zozo stood guard at the rubble, whining and growing thinner, waiting for the Houshmands to return. Nobody had the heart to take the dog away. Leila didn't understand its persistence. She understood much better the pull of the grave."
But Marta Claros, who bravely sneaks her way out of the slums of San Salvador and creates a life of harmony with the aging Korean proprietor of a dress factory in California, offers a final sense of hope and resilience to this gorgeously evocative novel. As the childless nanny for Enrique's growing family, Marta's story is one of faith and determination.
Never one to give up, whether it is to rescue her brother, who has taken to living in a tree in El Salvador, where he is witness to the most gruesome crimes of the officials, or to continue to hope for a child by putting her chickens' eggs in a decorated crib in her house, Marta is as grounded and solid as Enrique and Leila are untethered.
"In life there was a before and an after, Enrique believed, a gap between what you wanted and what you got, between what you planned and what actually happened."
Enrique finally accepts his life, and Leila has apparently given up on hers completely, but it is Marta who triumphantly closes this delightful book, leaving the reader with an indelible picture in mind.
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