My latest novel is called Under a Dark Sun. It’s a story of crime, corruption and colonialism set in an island very similar to Puerto Rico. I will be signing copies at the Kensington International Book Day celebration on April 17.
The book is available on Amazon.
Filed under Uncategorized
This is quite belated, but I want to say something about the passing of Edgardo Vega Yunqué, who at his best was as inventive, piercing, poignant and hilarious as any writer going today. Ed, who was 72, was born in Ponce and, since the age of 13, lived in New York. He died, mostly likely of a blood clot, in the last days of August.
The obits written about him in the New York Times and on various online sites, point out his great talent and greater potential (if only, they say, he had had a strong editor), and his cantankerous personality. Seems he was always getting into disputes –political, literary and personal—with editors, artists, acquaintances, friends and foes. He wrote three important, captivating and fierce novels about Puerto Ricans in New York. The first two went by very long titles: No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cause Bill Bailey Ain’t Never Coming Home Again, and The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow Into the Impenetrable Loisada Jungle. His third big novel was called Blood Fugues. His last novel, Rebecca Horowitz, Puerto Rican Sex Freak, a stinging satire on the recent spate of tell-all memoirs, was pulled from publication by Overlook Press at the last minute because of a dispute over the editing of the book.
Ed and I met twice in New York. We communicated often by email. I found him kind, sensitive, vulnerable, bitterly sweet, a little paranoid, intensely intelligent and incredibly generous. He wrote a great blurb for my novel, Shadow of the Fathers, and asked on his own to read it before it was published, then volunteered to edit it, at which he did a great job. We had a few disagreements. Ed thought that Hugo Chavez was a Godsend for Venezuela and all Latin Americans, while cynical me said God save us from all political saviors. When I sent him a review in Claridad of “Shadow of the Fathers” that accused me of “distorting Puerto Rican history” because in the novel I switched around the date of a real event that occurred on the island, Ed, who was having trouble with his publisher for what he called “corporate censorship,” told me we had much in common. “You’re getting it from the Left, and I’m getting it from the Right,” he said.
Although most of Ed’s kudos came for Bill Bailey, which probably is his most profound tome, Omaha Bigelow is my favorite. It is a magically realistic, highly raunchy, wildly funny, sadly poignant and deeply resonant novel about the Nuyoricans of the Lower East Side. Ed, always on the lookout to rile-up readers, intervenes post-modernly in the novel with opinions on art, life, literature and, especially, the U.S.-Puerto Rico relationship. He was always highly critical of the U.S. government for its treatment of the island, but he was 100 percent New Yorker who knew cruelty and evil when he saw it. In the book’s finale, Omaha Bigelow, the sympathetic punk-rock Gringo loser, is literally turned into a monkey and exiled into a real jungle for his unfaithfulness by his 15-year-old Puerto Rican girlfriend, who also happens to be bruja. All this comes about shortly after the attack on the Twin Towers. Here’s how the novel ends:
“When Omaha Bigelow felt particularly lonely, he climbed to the top of the very highest tree in the jungle, and from there he scanned the horizon and saw the vastness of the sea, its surface shimmering blue and emerald in the brilliant sunlight. If he concentrated more diligently, he could make himself look beyond the sea, and in his memory he was back in the East Village, standing on the rooftop of a building in the projects. From that vantage point he could look southward. He didn’t know why, but his heart ached when he saw the empty spaces of his mind where the towers had been. He could not explain their absence, but in his mind they were gone. He didn’t know what had happened, but he knew that something had taken place that was surrounded by horror. He thought that perhaps it was his own failed life that saddened him. Tears came into his eyes, and he knew he would never be happy again. He was just a poor monkey mired in the complexity of a world that had lost its poetry. Perhaps, he thought in his muddled monkey mind, we are all poor confused monkeys and all of us are lost in a world devoid of poetry.”
Ed continually tried to make sense of the complexity and his world was filled with poetry.
On Friday, Nov. 14, I will be venturing into the wilds of New Jersey for a reading of my novel, Shadow of the Fathers, at the Raconteur bookstore in Metuchen. Actually, Metuchen, which is close to New Brunswick, home of Rutgers University’s main campus, is about a 45-minute train ride from Penn Station. For those New Yorkers who can’t make the trek, I will also be having a reading-signing at Cemi Underground, a relatively new bookstore that carries books generally of Latino and especially of Puerto Rican interest. That reading is set for Saturday, Nov. 15, at 5 p.m. Cemi is located in the heart of El Barrio, at 112th Street and Lexington Avenue.
For those who don’t know, Shadow was inspired by a real-life incident that took place in Puerto Rico in the 1930s. Dr. Cornelius “Dusty” Rhoads, who was sent to Puerto Rico by the Rockefeller Foundation to research pernicious anemia, a prevalent disease on the island at the time, wrote a letter meant for a friend that he had purposely killed eight of his patients and injected cancer into others, his way of helping eliminate the “degenerate” population there. At my previous readings both in Puerto Rico and New York, I’ve been surprised how relatively few people know about the events. Although the novel uses the incident as a takeoff point to get into other things, I give a rundown at the reading of the Rhoads affair, which seems to astonish the listeners.
In the novel, I updated the incident to the 1950s. One critic in the Puerto Rican newspaper Claridad said that by changing the date, I “distorted” island history. But I believe I stayed true to the spirit of the incident and to those involved. Searching into souls rather than reciting facts makes a novel worth reading. In this case, I made the change in order to explore the way of the world from the time the U.S. became a world power, in the hope of saying something worthwhile about the incredibly ambivalent U.S.-Puerto Rico relationship, and about the nature of colonialism—from Vietnam to Vieques—and of the Cold War, and how the personal and the political interconnect, and about art and life and all those things that good novels are supposed to be about.
But let’s face it, most novelists really are the last to know what their books are about and what value, if any, they have for the reader. I was a journalist before I was a novelist. Journalism allowed me to see, to a degree, what makes the world around me tick. Fiction writing allows me to use my imagination to try to make that intuitive leap into the heart of whatever matter I’m writing about.
The event at Raconteur is a twofer. Also appearing that night will be Kal Wagenheim, author of two terrific books on baseball icons Babe Ruth and Roberto Clemente, editor of The Puerto Ricans: A Documentary History, and correspondent for the New York Times when he lived in Puerto Rico. Kal will be reading from a recently re-released book of short stories by Puerto Rican authors that he translated into English. Called Cuentos, the collection features the work in both the original Spanish and in English of such island authors as Pedro Juan Soto, Emilio Belaval, Abelardo Diaz Alfaro, Rene Marques, Jose Luis Gonzalez and Emilio Diaz Valcarcel. Regrettably, only one of those masterful writers, Diaz Valcarcel, is still with us. But their stories still pulse with life.
When I was writing for the late, lamented (certainly by me) San Juan Star, I reviewed the bilingual book when it was first published by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. (Its current publisher is Marcus Wiener of Princeton, NJ). Among other things, I noted, in two very long sentences, that: “I’m still from that old school that believes if you want to truly understand a society, its true aspirations and anxieties, its ideas and illusions, what makes each one of its people individual and alone though bound together in the collective fate of the human race, the deepest comprehension will come neither from the calculated cant of political voices nor the easy analysis of journalists—not even from the scholarly, measured words of historians and social scientists—but from that society’s real spokespersons: its creative writers. If we want to know what 19th Century London was really like we read Dickens; no history books have delved into the heart of the American South as the novels of William Faulkner; one surrealistic sentence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez gives more insight into the aberration that seems to be so much a part of Latin American history than any weighty tome on the subject.”
I added in the 1978 review: “I’d be willing to bet pesos to pasteles that the deep-down, soul-searching truths about Puerto Ricans in our time are going to come—if they have not already arrived—not so much from the pens of people who write for a living as from the pens of those who live to write.”
Thirty years later, as literate readers and writers appear to be diminishing, the bet still stands.
Former San Juan colleague (and author) Kal Wagenheim and I will present a discussion of Puerto Rico fact and fiction at a bookstore in Metuchen, NJ in early November. I’ll post more details as they become available.
Filed under Readings & Appearances
Shadow of the Fathers is my newest novel. Shadow explores the ambivalent relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico. The book is based on a true incident that took place in Puerto Rico when a doctor from the Rockefeller Institute claimed he had killed eight of his Puerto Ricans patients to help exterminate what he called the “degenerate” population there. The novel, written as a suspense mystery, looks into the U.S.-Puerto Rico political arrangement, as well as U.S. colonialism from the Cold War to Vietnam to Vieques. Besides the fictional characters, such historical figures as Pedro Albizu Campos, J. Edgar Hoover, Fidel Castro ad Francisco Franco influence the action in the novel.
Filed under Novels
by Robert Friedman 