An Islander with All Her Muddles
Reviews
By Drew Broussard
Who among us hasn’t felt, at one point or another, the desire to slip out of our life and fly back to somewhere we once called home? To leave our struggles and return to a place that holds some kind of safety—or, if not safety, then a kind of understanding. A place where we can get back in touch with some potentially lost part of ourselves.
But home is tricky. It’s not a house (we’re told), even though plenty of people make their houses into homes. And if home is where the heart is, if there’s no place like home, what happens to those of us who can’t go home again? These are the initial questions Cristina Bendek takes up in her Mújica Prize-winning novel Salt Crystals (Charco Press), vibrantly translated by Robin Myers.
Victoria Baruq, a child of San Andrés, has returned to the place she called home after some fifteen years away. The decision to pack up her Mexico City life and fly back to this tiny Colombian island off the coast of Nicaragua feels impromptu. “Years ago, I would rather have died than retrace my steps and return to San Andrés, which is what you do when you don’t know what the fuck you really want,” she tells the reader, even as she embraces the fact that she doesn’t know what the fuck she really wants.
Victoria left the island after a two-fold discovery: that her parents had died in a car accident, and that she’d been diagnosed as diabetic. All these years later, she’s still grappling with those realities—particularly her blood sugar, which she explains having carefully and painstakingly gotten under control only to nearly pass out several times over the first several days after arriving on the island. This, to my mind, supports the notion that home is a place after all. I know I’ve often gone back to the house I grew up in and found my carefully cultivated “adult” routines thrown immediately out the window. Indeed, it’s these moments of internal frustration, when Victoria is confused by and annoyed at herself for following some long-untouched instincts that contradict everything she’s learned since, that first charmed me.
She’s in search of something, some sense of place or understanding, and her confusion extends to what the future might hold for her. An older neighbor asks her if she’s planning to stay and, before she can answer, tells her not to: “It’s just that there’s no future here.” Right from the start, this seems obvious and true for Victoria. Her return to San Andrés is consumed by questions of the past: she’s living in her childhood home, reconnecting with old friends, engaging in the same debates about whether she (lighter-skinned, differently-accented, having spent nearly half her life somewhere else) is an islander or an outsider or somehow both.
Victoria is also caught up in the island’s history and its ghosts. As an English-speaking reader who’d never heard of San Andrés, I was particularly grateful for the heaping cup of history that Bendek stirs into the novel’s mix. It all dissolves nearly without a trace, but the moment where it clumps the thickest ended up being one of my favorite scenes in Salt Crystals: the “thinking rundown” Victoria attends with her childhood friend Juleen. Part block party and part community organizing meet-up, the rundown is a heady mix of drink and discussion accompanied by a stew that I could practically taste on the page. The discussion largely concerns the island’s history, including its near-annexation by the United States, but the point isn’t to rehash that history but rather to use it as an opportunity to interrogate how a society could be, and more specifically how life on San Andrés could look going forward. Victoria, a child of the island, is re-learning some of this history as most readers are learning it for the first time. That double whammy of understanding is a neat trick on Bendek’s part. We’re simultaneously being taught something new and experiencing another person’s re-contextualization of knowledge they thought they’d already acquired.
The chapter in which this “thinking rundown” occurs also contains another one of my favorite scenes, a moment of particularly jarring surreality. While looking for the bathroom in this house she has never been to, Victoria stumbles across the grave of her great-great-grandfather. Even as her friend Juleen scoffs at the coincidence, the reality of the discovery cannot be dismissed. That liminality—the deep blurring of the line between the real and the unbelievable—stuck with me for the rest of the book. Every further interaction or experience Victoria has, whether a conversation with a lover or a morning spent contemplating whether that sound on the roof is a duppy haunting her, is electrified by the very real sense that Victoria is inextricably tied to San Andrés whether she likes it or not.
Similarly, Robin Myers’ translation blurs lines with thrilling results. In her translator’s notes, Myers mentions that Bendek’s original text features “at least” three main languages: Spanish, Creole, and English. Myers does a superb job of bringing this linguistic polyphony to life even as she shifts the balance in obvious ways. Her translation includes conversations rendered in Creole patois, untranslated Spanish rubbing up against English, and a narrator who must shift gears between all three, bringing the reader along in real time.
Myers’ translation is also vividly attuned to the shifts in Victoria’s consciousness. As the winter approaches, she folds further into herself, even going so far as to acknowledge that “I’m the island again, an islander with all her muddles.” If the lyricism of her declarations begins to grate as the end of the novel approaches, I found it forgivable. Who among us hasn’t felt that need to make their life, their curiosities, their problems into the biggest possible thing they can imagine, even when faced with something as decidedly more significant as a hurricane bearing down? One has to make dynamic choices in order to feel like they’re in control of life. If nothing else, Victoria has clearly made a decision by the novel’s conclusion.
But Bendek keeps the result of that decision from the reader. “Nothing happens here until it does,” Victoria tells Juleen as she hunkers down to ride out Hurricane Otto. Half of the islanders have retreated to high ground. But the others have stayed put, secure in the belief that the island’s historical luck at being missed by storms will continue. Salt Crystals ends with the storm’s arrival and a sense that something is happening . . . a future? Perhaps, but it could also be catastrophe. The point is that none of us know. Home, then, is perhaps not a fixed location but a succession of moments building up to something greater. Not unlike a life, home is an amalgamation.
Drew Broussard is a writer, producer, and bookseller living in the Hudson Valley. His writing has appeared at Literary Hub, Tor Nightfire, Oh Reader, 3:AM Magazine, Unbound Worlds, and in friends’ mailboxes. He spent eight years on the artistic staff of The Public Theater and now produces podcasts with Literary Hub and events at The Golden Notebook bookstore in Woodstock, NY.
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