Paradise Travel: A Novel [Paperback]

Jorge Franco (Author), Katherine Silver (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 12, 2006

With stolen cash and tickets booked through a shady travel agency, Marlon Cruz and his girlfriend, Reina, have smuggled themselves out of Colombia and into the United States. But on their first night in New York City, they lose each other, and Marlon finds himself cast into the city's immigrant underworld, alone. As he searches for Reina in the bars and boarding houses where illegals congregate, the story of their harrowing cross over the border is retold, mapping the arc of a relationship that has transformed him into a reluctant immigrant.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

One of the self-anointed South American "McOndo" school of writers—instead of being children of Marx and Coca-Cola, they claim McDonald's, Macintoshes and condos—Franco saw his novel Rosario Tijeras sell over 100,000 copies in his native Colombia (it was published in the U.S. by Seven Stories last year). This fourth novel is Franco's second U.S. release, and it is disappointing. Medellín's teen princess Reina wants to go to America for reasons she can't quite articulate; her different color eyes, however, speak directly to patsy Marlon Cruz, who narrates, unreliably, in two time frames: their flight "through the bottom"—the horrible trip up Central America and through Mexico—and Marlon's year following an accidental separation from Reina. In the latter, he is rescued, Maria Full of Grace–style, by Patricia, the wife of a Colombian restaurateur in Queens, and learns to fit into the Colombian enclave in New York City; Franco's vignettes of expatriate Colombian life are the best things in the novel, particularly those involving a professional shoplifter and amateur dandy, Roger Pena. But Marlon, whose musings rarely rise above the level of "I really miss Reina," never understands what drives her, and the final discovery that she is, perhaps, no good comes as a surprise to no one but him. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

In this tale of Marlon Cruz, Franco (Rosario Tijeras) provides a glimpse of a substratum of society: the undocumented, divided from most of the rest of us by language, economics, and class. Love motivates Marlon to leave his home of Medellin, Colombia, instead of going to university; he has the hots for Reina, the girl all the boys are sniffing around, and Reina wants to go to New York. Since neither Reina nor Marlon qualify for a visa, they pay thousands of dollars (Reina steals it from Marlon's aunt's honeymoon savings) to Paradise Travel to smuggle them into the States. But soon after arriving in Queens, Marlon goes out for a smoke and becomes lost, unable to find his way back to Reina. Patricia, a restaurant owner's wife, literally saves his life, and Milagros, a waiter's friend, offers him love, while Marlon struggles for sustenance and searches for Reina. With Franco's nimble prose, full-bodied characters, and portrayals of the undocumenteds' travel and living conditions, ranging from near horrific to humorous, this is something special. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Picador (December 12, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312425961
• ISBN-13: 978-0312425968
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,871,625 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "...I always think of English as the language of necessity.", January 10, 2006

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Paradise Travel: A Novel (Hardcover)

Paradise Travel is more than a harrowing tale of an illegal immigrant's experience in New York City, Marlon Cruz separated from Reina on the first night they arrive at their coveted destination, exhausted, nothing as it was promised when they made plans in Medellin, Colombia. Stepping out for a smoke, Marlon comes face to face with a policeman. Startled, he panics, running into the night; soon he is lost in a city where everything looks the same, a stranger in a strange land without even a common language to protect him. Reina has engineered the details of their lives from the start of their romance in Colombia, drawing him with the force of her will into this terrifying journey to New York, the gold at the end of their rainbow. Without his muse, Marlon is pathetically vulnerable, wandering homeless until sympathetic Colombians take him in, clean him up and set the handsome young immigrant on the path to redemption from the nightmare of the unwelcoming streets. For one year and three months, Marlon spends all his time and energy in pursuit of his lost love.

His experiences along the way are charged with desperation and an urgent need for anonymity in New York City: "its millions of inhabitants; its blocks of cement, iron and glass; its tons of garbage; its time and energy, the madness and the blood." Those who befriend the distraught Marlon hear constantly of his love, his mission to find Reina in this vast sea of unfamiliar faces. He resides in flophouses, walk-ups that sleep three to a room, floundering among outcast alcoholics and prostitutes, willing to tolerate any condition until he can locate his woman, "until I found Reina I would live through whatever hell New York had to offer", not anticipating even one day of relief: "I was learning to live inside the intestines if the beast and feed off it, always careful not to provoke my host."

Moving back and forth in time, between Colombia, New York and Miami, Marlon incrementally reveals his story, the early days of Reina's determined seduction, the harrowing journey from country to country, courtesy of Paradise Travel, a front for moving illegals as tourists. With few clothes and money to bribe officials every step of the way, the ordeal is an unrelenting hell of trafficking, kidnapping, extortion, vicious coyotes and border guards, all looking to make a profit from the hushed masses dressed in black who shuffle through the night to the commands of their indifferent guides, "leaving their memories behind", along with identities, addresses and photographs.

From the confusion of that first terrifying night in New York, Marlon's emotions seesaw between fear and hope, new friends and a loving woman left behind when he picks up Reina's trail. With Reina as the more aggressive, dominant partner, Marlon has been the weaker of the pair, in thrall to her expectations. But the naďve, frightened young man is transformed by his trials, his harsh life lessons in dramatic relief in the hands of a courageous writer who speaks an uncomfortable truth. An unbelievable ordeal to the uninitiated becomes a path to a future free from fear, the prose as blunt and painful as Marlon's situation. Franco proves, once again, that you can't go home again, but that "a person's country is wherever there is love and affection." Luan Gaines/ 2006.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Starting all over again in the Promised Land, May 9, 2006

By 

Linda Oskam "dutch-traveller" (Amsterdam Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Paradise Travel: A Novel (Hardcover)

Marlon Cruz lives in Medellin, Colombia and is quite happy with the life he leads, even though he has no money to go to university. Then he meets Reina, the girl with whom all boys fall in love, but who chooses him. And she has a dream: she want to go to the United States. Constantly (sexually) attracting and rebuking Marlon, she not only gets him to join her on this risky trip, but also makes him help her to steal 5000$ from the new husband of Marlon's aunt. So Marlon gives up everything that he values to go with Reina to New York. After a gruelling trip they arrive in New York as illegal immigrant. The first evening Marlon gets lost in the streets, cannot find Reina anymore and looses his mind for a while. He is -literally- taken from the gutter by the wife of a Colombian restaurant owner and then he can start where all illegal immigrants start: at the bottom of the social ladder, cleaning toilets. And meanwhile he keeps searching for Reina, even after he has met a much nicer and friendlier lady. Ultimately he finds Reina and discover that her reason to travel to the United States was not what he thought it was.

In itself a nice book, but it did not give me new insights: Marlon is a young man who follows his hormones rather than common sense and that life as an illegal immigrant is not a bed of roses is something I already knew after seeing the umptieth documentary on television.