First Impressions Review: The Book of Lost Saints, by Daniel José Older
Wow, this book! The idea of having a main character who is the ghost of a woman who disappeared during the Cuban Revolution and who is haunting her nephew to get him to investigate what happened to her immediately grabbed my attention. I was definitely expecting some feelings, given my own family’s connection to those events, but I was cautious given that the version of the narrative given by many “Miami Cubans” is kind of one-sided and conservative. This book doesn’t do that – it is quite nuanced – and the level of relatable emotion this evoked was more than I expected. That included not just one’s desire to pass on or learn stories being hampered by the pain of those who experienced them, but also a sense of mourning for the new free Cuba that could have been and wasn’t. Also, though I predicted the answer to one of the first mysteries – why Marisol is so angry at her sister – the story then kept going and giving us new twists and turns that I definitely didn’t expect.
One of the very-relatable things in this story is the way the characters keep switching between Spanish and English, sometimes in the middle of a sentence:
“Actually,” Teresa chimes in, “I think you will find that in a few years, television will surpass the cinema…” “¡Qué mierda!” Juan-Carlos thunders. “Have you turned on the TV in the past six years, woman? It’s this thing they have, what’s it called, Reality TV?...Oyeme, esa cosa, they film people, in their homes, no? And they argue and carry on, every single episode – every single one, mi vida – someone either has sex or gets into a fight…What reality is this?” Nilda shakes her head. “Juan-Carlos, por favor…”
That might be a little confusing if you didn’t grow up with that1, but roll with it anyway – you can probably mostly figure out what was said from context, and the phrases you really shouldn’t miss do get translated. Sometimes Marisol even uses language to muse on ideas, pointing out, for instance, that in Spanish “why?” (por que?) is almost the same as “because” (porque) - but she needs more of an answer than that!
1. I can still picture the baffled faces of some of my school friends coming to visit when my Abuelita was around…especially if my dad’s Brazilian students were there too, adding a third language to the mix!
I really like Marisol as ghost-protagonist. She was headstrong and determined as a girl (if a bit naive), with a fiery desire for justice, and you can tell that her spirit-version still retains those qualities. One thing that wasn’t clear from the blurb that added extra intrigue to the story is that Marisol herself doesn’t remember what happened to her. She does remember that one of her sisters was a rebel, but also there were purges following the initial revolution - so Marisol suspects she was killed by either Batista’s regime or Castro’s but has no idea which! It is only when she half-merges with her sleeping nephew that the memories come back to her and are transferred into his dreams simultaneously. I won’t spoil the ending, but it turns out there is a lot more to her life and how she ended up in her current disembodied state than either of them realizes!
The nephew, Ramon, is a DJ in New Jersey, initially pretty apathetic to most things that aren’t music. Marisol initially describes him like this:
So alive, this useless boy-man. All his cluttered organs and gushy pumping liquids, all that life! A waste, really…But you who inhabit these mortal bags – you guys just don’t get it.
Gradually, though, he starts to wake up and get a bit more intentional about his own life as well as more and more drawn into the mystery of his aunt’s life and death. I like his crew, including his Filipina doctor girlfriend Aliceana and lesbian lawyer housemate Adina. His online musical contacts in Cuba prove useful when it comes time to investigate the (suspected) scene of the crime.
There is one scene that starts out great but where I wasn’t too keen on the ending, since it felt a bit “Schroedinger’s queers” to me. The partygoers weren’t named characters as in ‘Lagoon’(the one where I felt the need to coin the term), so it isn’t as egregious to drop them in danger and never tell us what happened to them. But, c’mon, Mr. Older: you know you were using the danger facing gay people in Cuba to build tension without actually telling their story at all! And we had a named gay Cuban character we were starting to like – Kacique – who could have been more of a focus if one wanted to get into that experience a bit more deeply.
That aside, I like how the variety of people included helps to showcase how not only the immigrant experience as a whole, but even specifically the Cuban immigrant experience, depends on when people left, what their place in Cuban society and their political beliefs had been, and what social and economic status they have in the US. We see, for example, a wealthy right-wing character who thinks any engagement with Cubans who stayed is treason; people like Ramon’s boss/mentor Luis, who are leftists who still left because they saw how things were going; and Ramon and his Cuban counterparts, the next generation, who are a bit disillusioned with both countries but are finding connection expressing their own ideas about change through music.
This book understands that, even if things went wrong, there was a reason the revolution happened:
And now the whole country feels like that moment of chaos before a song resolves back to its one chord, and Isabel’s part of that dissonance, a tiny reminder that we’ve never known harmony, it’s just now we’ve reached a fever pitch and everyone craves that tipping point, after centuries of Spanish rule and then yanqui2 rule by proxy and never freedom, just the veneer of it…I read all the books Isabel left for me a thousand times, but mostly Martí…who hated empire in all its forms…The yanquis have their hands as deep in our pockets and our personal business as the Spanish did, and the echoes of one long-ago brutality resonate all the way to today.
2. Yankee; American. While many Cubans at the time were enamored of American culture, Batista’s mafia contacts controlled gambling and prostitution rings in Havana, and multi-national corporations (many headquartered in the US) were preferentially awarded a lot of lucrative contracts – and THAT was not appreciated! As with much of Latin America, the US government also had a tendency to interfere to try and make sure the local government remained favorable to them.
There are a lot of other lines that just punch me straight in the feels as well:
“Revolution asks that its children put not only their own lives on the line, but the lives of all their friends and loved ones as well…And then they won and the win was hollow and the whole circus swirled around one man, and it wasn’t the man Gómez had put all of his loved ones on the line to be ruled by”
Or:
“Should I feel bad for torturing my nephew’s nights with the shards of my imprisonment?... It’s another endless ripple of trauma, I know, poisoning a whole new generation, but he needs to understand… We all bury the worst parts so deep inside…praying it’ll just evaporate. But I am that truth.”
On a funnier, if still sad, note, there is an old woman who’s on a hunger strike and when she finds out there are American visitors she says:
“Bueno.” It’s a whisper, a croak really. “Mira, ver si quieren refresco.”
Yep. That’s a Latina grandma all right! Even if starving herself for a cause, her reaction to guests is: “Good. See if they want refreshments”!
There are some aspects toward the end that feel a bit like a telenovela – and you’ll know exactly which bits I mean when you get to them! However, it would be a lie to say that they didn’t make me kind of happy. This story could have ended dark and depressing, and with the week I was having I was glad that it didn’t! And it already had magical elements, so it isn’t like that kind of twist doesn’t fit with the world that is established.
Overall recommendation: It’s hard for me to say if you would like this if you didn’t grow up with the very specific experience of hearing fragments of stories about the Cuban revolution and the sadness of exile in English and Spanish mashed together, but without the pretension that Cuba before was a paradise for all. I hope so, though! Probably if you like the sound of a supernatural mystery mixed with historical fiction, and you enjoy the writing samples above, you would enjoy the book as a whole.
