Man's best friend outside of a dog, 8: Dreaming in Cuban, by Cristina Garcia

There is something of a recurring theme in the female characters that appear in magical realism novels, in that at least one woman per family needs to live at least partially on the spiritual plane. This is very clear in Isabel Allende's "House of the Spirits", forms perhaps the main theme of "Like Water For Chocolate (haven't read it, but I've seen the movie a couple times), and makes up the heart of this novel as well. The story of three generations of a family split between Cuba and New York, the book takes a very ethereal approach to issues of dislocation and separation, much more concerned with people's dreams than their politics. Garcia isn't much of a narrative storyteller, more a spinner of tales that illuminate facets of her characters and their relationships. Perhaps befitting the image of the Cuban community as a wee bit out there (let's face it, every fictional work ever set in Miami basically assumes this as truth, from Scarface to Miami Vice to CSI, or the novels of Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen, among others), most of the characters are a wee bit insane, at least at times.

If there is a running theme in the book, it is the ways in which isolation can force us to extremes, regardless of whether the isolation is caused by family or by the politics of an embargo. From generation to generation, we have love and other emotions expressed as both alliance and antagonism, as only families can inspire. Most of the action here, such as it is, lies within it's protagonists' minds.They retreat into memory, seek out connections, and basically try to find a place in the world for themselves, all while the potential sources of stability generally conspire against them. Still, it is not so much the events in their lives that define them, but rather their reactions to them, and the people who surround them. Inasmuch as the book is a meditation about mindsets, it is ultimately successful, more a painting than a story to remember. Garcia, it should be noted, writes in English like the world's finest writers write in Spanish, heavy on the adjectives but in a way that explores the bounds of expression. Think Marquez, but with multiple sentences per page. It's rare to find such confident prose stylings, and really stands out among the various Spanish/Latin American authors out there.