Customer Reviews

A Handbook to Luck (Vintage Contemporaries)

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would have never read it if it weren't for my latina gender class i had last semester!!!!! its a great read and i took alot out of it!!!

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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Cristina Garcia's "A Handbook to Luck" centered around Enrique, the son of a Las Vegas magician from Cuba who was a genius in mathematics and was thrown into the world of poker as he grew up in the casino environment. Enrique had always blamed his father, Fernando for his mother's death as she died from one of Fernando's acts. He met Leila, a beautiful girl from Iran who was in Las Vegas for a vacation before her arranged marriage to another Iranian. Leila had to make the ultimate decision of whether to stay with Enrique or to return to California where her fiance was waiting. Then, there was Marta, who wanted nothing but to leave El Salvador to seek a better life in the United States and to be away from her abusive husband.

"A Handbook to Luck" focused on the intervowen lives of these three main characters from childhood to adult. This was a somewhat interesting read as the decisions that each of these characters made were life-changing and how by random chances that they met each other. This was a bittersweet, somwhat tragic and moving novel.

It took me a while to get through this book. Partly because it is Serious (with a capital S) and partly because I have never been fond of the structure Garcia employs, which is to have 3 separate main characters and dedicate chapters to each of them over a long period of time.

Marta, an immigrant from El Salvador; Enrique, a Cuban immigrant who moved to Las Vegas with his magician father and Leila, an Iranian woman trapped in a loveless marriage only interact with one another on a handful of occasions over the course of the 300 + page book. Marta and Enrique fall for one another in their early 20's, but Leila marries a man her mother picked for her and Enrique marries a wannabe showgirl. Marta appears briefly in Enrique's chapters as his children's nanny.

I'm not overly fond of serious literature, and this book was very high on small details (flowers, birds, food) and very low on any sort of actual storyline. Even the title was strange - luck? Where? The ending is very unsatisfying and I finished the book feeling sad and a bit depressed.

On a positive note, Garcia is an excellent writer and her turn of phrase and obvious understanding of what it is to be an immigrant and adopt a second country is well portrayed. She also created some wonderful characters (in particular Enrique's father was very entertaining). I don't think I'd actually recommend this book, but I'm glad I stuck with it through to the end.

"A Handbook To Luck," by Christina Garcia, is a lovely novel about the bittersweet roles that luck, coincidence, happenstance, and choice play in our lives.

It's a very short novel that feels more like three intertwining novellas. The stories unfold chronologically as we follow three separate protagonists--Enrique Florit, the mathematically gifted Cuban-American son of a flamboyant professional magician; Marta Claros, a child of abject poverty from the slums of San Salvador; and Leila Rezvani, a wealthy and privileged daughter of an Iranian surgeon and his vain Russian wife. We watch their lives in brief snapshots from 1968 through 1987. We learn about the sorrows, joys, difficult decisions, and everyday pleasures that mark their existence as each struggles to build a decent and happy life. The character's lives cross paths in unexpected ways. Luck comes in many guises. Sometimes the characters recognize their good fortune and seize the moment, but at other times they are totally unaware of these golden opportunities and let them slip away. This is a book about choices, about the paths taken and not taken in our lives.

The author, Christina Garcia, is a 48-year-old Cuban-American who studied political science and international relations at Barnard and Johns Hopkins before starting work as a journalist for "Time" magazine. Eventually, she turned her attention to writing poetry and novels. This work is her fifth novel. According to a newspaper interview about the book (Charleston, "Sunday Gazette," July 22, 2007), the author recently took up painting and is making an artist studio for herself in her Napa Valley, California, home. I wasn't the least bit surprised when I read this. Garcia's prose is filled with subtle lyrical nuance and vivid imagery-exactly what I'd expect from a writer who is also a poet and a painter. For me, reading her prose was what I enjoyed most about this short, wise, and emotionally layered work.

This novel takes a large philosophical view on life, and it will probably cause readers to reminisce about their own lives and missed opportunities. The book gets only a three-and-a-half star rating from me (rounded up to 4-stars, here) primarily because I felt a bit let down by the end--I wanted more from the plot and the character's lives. But, the book is a beautiful, well-written story, and I recommend it. Don't hesitate to read it if you want a short, contemplative book that is as easy and quick to read, as it is beautiful and meaningful.

I really enjoyed the complexity and unique-ness of all three of the main characters. They each had their own motivations to drive their choices--which were not always noble, but true to their characters. While "luck" wasn't an obvious metaphor each character did take a chance and it was just as much a gamble for them as it was for the reader. For all three of the characters I was willing to follow the choices they made--not knowing who would turn out the big winner, or who would lose it all. Just like in life sometimes there were high stakes, and sometimes it was just about breaking even. The journey of this book is a good one to follow.

In A Handbook to Luck, Cristina Garcia has given us a skillful treatment of universal themes and multilayered, compelling characters. In different parts of the world, revolution creates upheavals in the lives of characters who are set in unforeseen circumstances. They try to function within the arbitrary and unpredictable reality of their lives as they deal with political brutality, institutionalized violence, immigration, alienation and conflicting family loyalties. Survival depends on regeneration and reinvention. But to what degree are they masters of their destinies and to what degree does their survival depend on pure chance?

Cristina Garcia brings an array of characters to her latest novel, including figures from Cuba and El Salvador, and thus adds to the dimensions of Hispanic writing in the United States. A splendid read!