Title - Are We Ever Our Own
Author: Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes
Out Now
Disclaimer: ARC via LibraryThing
Fuentes’
collection are short stories that focus on the women in one huge and extended
family. Some of the stories take place before
the families’ immigration out of Cuba and some take place during the revolution
in Cuba. There is a sense of magic in
all the tales though some hew more closely to magic realism than straight forward
fantasy – some of the tales draw from real life figures.
The first
story is one of these. It focuses, in
part, on the ghost of the artist Ana Medieta haunting the home/studio of fellow
artist Donald Judd. The focus on this story isn’t so much just art, but the
effect of art on the people around it and what art can be as well as the intersection
of race, class, and gender. The story
ends on a rather beautiful and heartbreaking image.
It is followed
by the tale of two close friends and what happens in the aftermath of the
revolution. “The Burial of Fidela Armando
Castell” . Some of the same themes from
that story are used in “The Night the Almiqui” though a completely different way.
Both “Two
Gallon Heat”, “Elephant Foot”, and “The Field of Professional Mourning” all
highlight both the fantastic and horror, but also different areas of
society - from the relationships in familiar
to the relationships between girls to the idea of grief and performance, if it
is, in fact performance.
In many
ways the idea of creation and gender – in particular creation and women - takes center stage in many of the stories,
answering that question that the title of the book asks. And this does make it a stand out short story
collection. It’s true that there a few
stories that don’t quite gel, at least for me, but even in those, I have to
give Fuentes credit for experimentally and taking narrative or structural
risks.
Many of
the stories, even some of the ones I didn’t like, have powerful images and description. You can understand why BOA Short Fiction prize.
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