Customer Reviews

Paradise Travel: A Novel

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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 naïve, 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.

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.