Review by New York Times Review
THE novel of braided, alternating stories, perfected by David Mitchell, is a narrative daisy chain designed to tease readers by a process akin to coitus interruptus. One story stops, another begins, then a third, then more, then it's back to the first and so on. Novels like this suggest hidden connections between disparate sets of characters, although the spectacle of sheer juxtaposition - of incongruous stories slyly interpolated - is also part of their appeal Sometimes major characters in one story become secondary characters in others. Or unexpected events ripple through the separate sections, providing an accidental link. To give their narrative centrifuge a provisional stability, novelists sometimes employ a framing device. Why not, for example, set one's alternating stories in - of course! - a hotel? In this manner, a technique as old-fashioned as the 1932 film "Grand Hotel" merges with the postmodernism of Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas." The hotel in "The Lady Matador's Hotel," by Cristina García, located in the capital city of an unnamed Central American country, is the luxurious Miraflor. The time frame is a week. And the stories involve a set of global mongrels and expatriates: a Japanese-Mexican matadora who was raised in Los Angeles and has just arrived for "the first Battle of the Lady Matadors in the Americas"; a suicidal Korean manufacturer of textiles who owns a local maquiladora, Glorious Textiles Unlimited, and whose pregnant mistress is living at the hotel; a lawyer who employs breeder mothers to produce the babies she delivers for adoption to wealthy Americans staying at the hotel; an exiled Cuban poet married to one of those wealthy Americans; an army colonel in town to swap the latest torture and detainment techniques with other thugs from neighboring countries; and an exguerrilla whose brother was murdered by the colonel years ago, and who now works as a waitress at the hotel. In six chapters, an "interlude" and an epilogue, their separate stories advance by shuffled increments against the backdrop of a presidential election, insurgent bombs and an impending hurricane. The result is a kitchen sink of a novel (as in everything but) whose juggled stories, augmented by the obligatory soupcon of magic realism, take on a quality of festive, freakish excess. Yet García keeps the plates spinning. Not all the stories are equally engaging, and not all the characters rise above the level of types, but the cumulative effect is of an appealing yet barely controlled wildness. The control is in the scaffolding - seven days, six main characters, a collage of news items at the end of each chapter - and at times it can seem constraining. But without the constraint the wildness would sputter. At its best, the novel has the energy of an obsessive tango. Or, indeed, a bullfight. García, whose novel "Dreaming in Cuban" was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992, attempts to deepen her characters with each successive pass of their stories. Suki Palacios, the lady matador, may be the central figure, but as we learn more about them the ex-guerrilla, Aura, and the Korean entrepreneur. Won Kim, are the most memorable and complex. In a novel so stuffed with incident, it is these lonely and isolated characters, not the power-brokers and celebrities, who most come alive. García's taste for the exotic and incongruous sometimes leads her storytelling to become mannered and perfunctory, as in her glib penny-postcard sketch of the baby broker's mother. When pregnant with her daughter, we learn, she "rode horses from morning to dusk," presumably to rid herself of the fetus. Instead, she partially dislodged a cervical plug and was ordered to bed for the remainder of her pregnancy, where she "soon began reading as voraciously as she rode. She grew obsessed with Thomas Mann's 'Magic Mountain' and read it nine times, always hoping for a different ending." Other passages, like the encounters between the Cuban poet and the matador, or the conversation between the poet and Won Kim in an elevator, are half-baked and strained, as if a reluctant García felt obliged to create more bridges between her stories. They lack her usual wry incisiveness. Fortunately, her writing is usually much better. The bullfighting scenes are beautifully rendered, and her descriptions are often subtle and precise: "It's cool and quiet in the cathedral, reverberating with the prayers of the devoted: viejitas in mantillas and disintegrating veils; a shriveled man the exact shade of his beige suit; a quartet of nuns from the countryside looking like trussed-up guinea hens." In another fine passage, the melancholic Korean's smoke rings aren't what they used to be: "Now the best he can manage are wobbly semicircles that drift aimlessly overhead. He has half a mind to suck them back into his lungs, incubate them until they turn into toxic brown spots. Given a choice, he would ingest all his mistakes this way." In the end, there's no climactic fiesta or disaster to bring all the characters together. The story lines unravel as they must, and the novel doesn't end - it stops. But how could it do otherwise when each day in this world, as Won Kim tells himself, "is an inexplicable wilderness"? The luxurious hotel in Cristina García's new novel is inhabited by a set of global mongrels and expatriates. John Vernon's most recent novel is "Lucky Billy." He teaches in the creative writing program at Binghamton University.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 12, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The Hotel Miraflor is the epicenter for explosive conflict in the capital of an unnamed Central American country ravaged by civil war and corruption. During the first week in November 2003, a presidential campaign reaches fever pitch, a military conference convenes at the hotel, and battles intimate and political, ritualized and spontaneous, erupt with seismic force. The hotel's most prominent guest is a veritable goddess, Suki Palacios, a lithe and fearless matador from California of Mexican and Japanese descent, a woman who brandishes her beauty like a weapon. Another indomitable woman, attorney Gertrudis, uses the hotel as headquarters for her lucrative black-market adoption operation. Won Kim, a reluctant Korean factory owner, has sequestered his pregnant teenage mistress in the honeymoon suite. Aura, an ex-guerrilla working as a waitress at the hotel, plots revenge against a murderous, weight-lifting colonel. Garcia strides and twirls with a matador's daring, grace, and focus as she enters the psyches of diverse, intense, and unnerving characters; choreographs converging and dramatic story lines; and confronts the pervasiveness of the inexplicable. Streamlined, sexy, darkly witty, and succinctly tragic, Garcia's fifth sharply imagined novel of caustic social critique concentrates the horrors of oppression and violence into a compulsively readable tale of coiled fury and penetrating insight.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Sensual prose softens the crushing blows that life doles out to almost every character in this latest from Garcia (Dreaming in Cuban), in which six lives cross paths in a luxury hotel somewhere in the tropics of Central America. It's a gloomy portrait of modern life, told through a series of vivid, sometimes fantastical, narrative moments. In the honeymoon suite, a Korean businessman contemplates suicide as his pregnant 15-year old mistress flits around dressed up like a harlot from a bygone era. On the rooftop, waitress and ex-guerrilla Aura Estrada sips tea with her dead brother, who warns her of the arrival of the colonel who killed him. Martin Abe, the corpulent colonel, plots against leftists, curses the wife who's left him, and lusts after the most talked about guest in the hotel: Suki Palacios, also known as the Lady Matador. A Californian of Mexican and Japanese descent, Suki is in town to fight in the first ever Battle of the Lady Matadors in the Americas. The sultry atmosphere, dash of the supernatural, and well-developed characters are a winning mix, and the story's many parts move with frictionless ease. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Garcia's fourth novel (after A Handbook to Luck) involves six people whose lives are spent in the Hotel Miraflor, in a nameless capital in Central America. Suki, a Japanese Mexican American female matador, is in town for a bullfighting tournament, and her presence in the hotel is met with awe. Aura, a waitress in the hotel cafe, is an ex-guerrilla whose brother, in the form of a ghost, persuades her to avenge his murder by a colonel who is a guest at the hotel. Ricardo, a poet and a Cuban exile, is traveling with his wife to adopt a baby from the area, while Gertrudis is the powerful and corrupt lawyer arranging the adoption. Won Kim, a suicidal manager of a local textile factory, has a mistress who is expecting his child. Garcia uses the romantic and familial relationships to detail the politics of Latin America. VERDICT Garcia, whose Dreaming in Cuban was a finalist for the National Book Award, creates characters whose situations are intertwined in a way that produces a powerful narrative. With its multicharacter story line and subject matter, this book recalls Roberto Bolano's 2666 and the novels of Julia Alvarez, and will appeal to readers who enjoyed those books.-Cristella Bond, Anderson P.L., IN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Six characters in an unnamed tropical city consider matters of life and death, sex and politics, in a brief, intense, imperfectly resolved chronicle of overlapping destinies.Skilled, sensuous and wry, Garca (A Handbook to Luck, 2007, etc.) displays economy and impressionistic deftness via her diverse cast centered in the Hotel Miraflor, located in a volcanic, Latin American "wedge of forgotten land between continents." Here, after a recent history of violent political turmoil, an election is looming in which the ex-dictator is standing for president, while bombs explode in rival hotels. Meanwhile, Korean textile manufacturer Won Kim dreams of suicide for himself and his pregnant teenage mistress; guerrilla-turned-waitress Aura plots revenge on Colonel Abel for the savage murder of her brother; and lawyer Gertrudis Stber sells babies to rich white visitorssuch as poet Ricardo Morn. But most eyes are on the thrillingly beautiful yet unattainable Suki Palacios, here to compete in the first Battle of the Lady Matadors in the Americas. Observing these characters over six days, as they pursue their preoccupations with birth, blood, desire and duty, Garca simultaneously evokes a corrupt, vibrant culture via snippets of news and gossip. More successful as a sequence of character portraits than a full narrative, the book concludes with some positive choices and some open-ended possibilities, yetremains short of a larger sense of narrative unity.Six brightly located characters in search of more than synchronicity.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
