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-Hello and welcome back to Book Lust.
I'm your host, Nancy Pearl.
My guest today via Zoom at the Folio Library in downtown
Seattle is author and playwright, Cristina Garcia.
Cristina, thank you so much for joining us today on Book
Lust. It's just such a pleasure
to get to talk to you about your writing
and especially your new book.
-Oh, thank you so much. It's great to be back.
-Did -- so, let's start back in 90s,
you wrote a book called
Dreaming in Cuban, right? Exactly!
-That was many years ago, right.
-And so, you wrote a novel called
Dreaming in Cuban and it was about the Cuban revolution,
the immigrant experience, the world that was at that time.
And then many years later,
but I know they went by very quickly
because that's what time does, you wrote a sequel to Dreaming
in Cuban called Vanishing Maps.
So, can we go back and start with the impetus
for Dreaming in Cuban
and introduce some of the characters
who are going to reappear in one form or another
in Vanishing Maps?
-Right. Sure, of course. Thank you.
Well, Dreaming in Cuban was my very first novel,
it came out in 1992
and I would say it's the most biographical of anything --
-Yeah.
-Written, not surprisingly, since it was the first novel.
And it chronicles the lives of a family
bitterly divided over the Cuban revolution.
Half of them stay in Cuba,
the other half emigrate to the US.
And there's a -- and what ensues is this shouting match
for decades thereafter
and it focuses on the women of this family.
The matriarch, Celia del Pino, who's a devotee,
staunch supporter of the revolution.
Her daughter, Felicia, who is a kind of deranged hairdresser.
And then the other daughter, Celia's other daughter,
who leaves, ends up in the New York,
opening a bakery,
and vowing to fight communism from behind her counter
with her crullers and sticky buns.
She has a daughter, Pilar,
who is the opposite of her mother, as often happens.
And there is a reunion involved where the mother,
daughter go back to Cuba
and all kinds of mischief and mayhem ensue.
So, I think that's a kind of overview.
-Yeah. What I thought --
I mean these lovely touches that you had in
Dreaming in Cuban.
So, the name of the bakery that Pilar's mother starts,
which begins --
which is a series of bakeries in New York,
they're called Yankee Doodle. I mean she's fighting communism
in every possible way that she can.
There was, you know, as in many Latin American novels,
there was what we call magic realism,
but what I always prefer to think of it
as elastic realism that it, you know,
to say it's magic realism in a way narrows it
but elastic realism you sort of think of a rubber band
and how it's including, you know --
can encompass all these different things.
Was that part of your using magic realism
and elastic realism, was that part of your --
did you always know that that would be part of the novels?
-First of all, I love that phrase, elastic realism.
-Oh, good.
-I'm going to adopt it and credit
it to you Nancy because -- -Oh, please do it.
-It's perfect and concisely describes what I try and do,
which is not search for magical opportunities necessarily
unless, you know, of course they present themselves.
But to consider these realities as extensions of characters
and extensions of their subjectivity
and their preoccupations, both personal and political.
So, for me, that can mean seeing ghosts, you know,
and talking to the dead. It could mean apparitions.
It could mean being consumed by scene,
a distorted scene from the past
or imagining talking to a comandante,
for example, which Celia does.
He always imagines him kind of looking over her shoulder
and into her life. -Right.
-So, all of these for me are forms of elastic realism.
Right, it rolls off the tongue.
-Yeah, it does. It's great.
I must have read it somewhere years ago, but I've always --
-So, I didn't set out to do that,
although I'm a big fan of elastic realisms
from many different cultures.
Probably the first I came across most dramatically
was Kafka's Metamorphosis -- -Right.
-When I was a teenager and I'm like you can do this?
This is...
And then the same for reading a lot of the Russian masters.
The things that happened in Gogol
or even American literature and Toni Morrison's work
and Louise Erdrich's work in poetry of all sorts.
So, it's not exclusive to the Latin American --
-Right. -Tonation.
-Right.
And I think by thinking of it as elastic realism
rather than magic -- I mean to say magical realism
is to sort of place it in the Latin world
because we think of García Márquez and all of that,
but it is as you say everywhere.
It's a choice that the writer makes to look
beyond the world of here and now.
-Yes, sort of to be open to the moment
and the writing of things expanding,
of unspooling in unpredictable ways.
-Right. Yeah. And when you -- at the end --
Cecilia is one of the great characters
I think in contemporary literature.
I mean she's a remarkable, remarkable woman.
I just -- I was just full of admiration for her
and, you know, her belief in the cause
of the revolution and Castro and all of that.
And you never named Castro, that's so interesting right,
he's never mentioned by name.
-Well, he isn't, he's always a leader
or maybe even a comandante. -Right.
-But I think for me I was playing also along with --
I mean it's clearly Cuba by all the indications
and details of the story. -Right.
-But I also wanted to tap into this long tradition
of what I call the "caudillo" novels
"Caudillo" is like "strong man" in Spanish.
The caudillo novels of Latin America,
of which there are many, it's a very rich tradition.
And so, I wanted part of the story to reference that,
you know, that strong man, whether it's Cuba
or whether it was in Guatemala with el presidente
or with Trujillo in the Dominican Republic,
the feast of the goat. It is --
they are a part of all of our lives, inheritances,
political legacies which people are contending with to this day.
-Yeah. So, then -- so at the end of
Dreaming in Cuban,
it's not clear at that time, I think to readers,
today even if somebody reads it for the first time,
it isn't clear that there is going to be a sequel.
You know in some books you know it just ends
and you know there's got to be a sequel.
And by golly, it took you like, you know, 30 years
or so to think of the sequel. What was the impetus for that?
-Well, that's interesting. Just for your readers.
The novel ends with Celia, the matriarch,
who supported the revolution walking kind of heartbroken
and distraught into the sea and presumption
is I think that she is going to drown herself.
-Right. -And I leave it ambiguous.
And so, I was peppered with questions
in the many years since.
What happened to her? Did she really die?
-Right. -Did she kill herself?
Did the coast guard pick her up? What happened?
And honestly I said, I don't know.
I really didn't know. But if someone had pressed me,
I probably would've said yeah, I think she took her own life.
So, imagine my surprise, Celia is alive.
And this only happened because I revisit, you know, for me,
Dreaming in Cuban was a done deal.
It was a discrete novel. I had no plans for a sequel,
but many years later I was asked to adapt the book for theater.
And so, I reread the book several times
to again refamiliarize myself
with everyone and that's when it began,
that's when I started to think well what happened to them?
Did Celia really kill herself?
What happened to Ivanito who was kidnapped by Lourdes,
the bakery owner in Brooklyn,
and hauled over, you know, talk about culture shock,
from outside of Havana to Brooklyn in the 70s,
you know, and everyone else. And it was even made, you know,
I think I had enough distance on it too
because even to adapt it, I had to change a lot of things.
I had to be very flexible about the narrative,
about the characters, about the timeframe.
And then I made the actors,
embodying these characters in ways
that I couldn't have imagined to the extent
that some of them would say,
you know, the character would say that to me
and I was like oh, yes.
And so, then everything seemed possible,
everything was back on the table.
And I had been working on something else at the time
and I remember discussing with my daughter,
also named Pilar, and she said you know mom,
just go with what is interesting you now.
And so, I began Vanishing Maps like that just as an experiment,
just to find out for myself what had happened
and then it juggernauted, if that's a word,
into what became Vanishing Maps.
-What -- how did you choose the title?
-Vanishing Maps? -Yes.
-Yeah. Well, it seemed to me that in, you know,
I set the sequel 20 years after the original,
although I was writing it nearly 30 years
after the original, like for 20 --
more like 27 years after the original
and it seemed to me that that world
that they were living in when the book ended in 1980
was vastly different than the one they were facing
on the eve of the millennial.
-Right.
-Everything had happened globally.
The fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of the Soviet Union
which was absolutely crucial to Cuba --
revolutionary Cuba's survival.
-Right.
-All these seismic, cataclysmic changes
that it seemed to me would have dispersed this clan
around the globe, which in fact it did.
-Right. -And so, I had to consider
all of that political upheaval in the big sense
with the personal dislocation of all of these characters,
which of course, you know, they ended up around the world,
Moscow and Los Angeles and Berlin and, you know,
and then cordoned them in slowly over the course of the novel
around this one character in Berlin.
-I felt that -- just going back to Dreaming
in Cuban and Celia for a moment, one of the scenes --
that last scene is when she takes off the earrings
that her lover of four days that she's --
a Spanish man that she has been corresponding in her mind
with for all these years
and he has given her those earrings
and she takes them off and gives them to the sea
basically was extremely moving.
But what I felt when I was reading Vanishing Maps,
I thought God you must have done so much research
for so much of this book
because it didn't seem possible that you all this knowledge
that you could just draw on out of your mind.
Is that fair to say? Did you do any research?
-Absolutely! A lot of historical research.
Although I have to say that for Celia herself,
I hope I'm not giving away too much to say
that this old lover with whom she was obsessed in fact.
I think Celia would say she had two great loves in her life,
this Spaniard, Gustavo Sierra de Armas
with whom she had a very passionate four day affair,
as you said, in the 1930s,
and then Fidel Castro, a leader himself,
to whom she devoted a good part of her adult life as well.
Not her husband significantly. -Right.
-Among the great loves.
Anyway, so she -- this is another part,
kind of another string of the book
is that Gustavo contacts her.
They're both in their 90s at this point
and he makes an overture to her after his wife dies.
-Yeah.
-And at first she's super irritable
like who does he think he is
and, you know, he thinks...
But she ends up going to Spain for a reunion,
unexpected reunion.
And that part I didn't have to research,
I felt like I knew Celia well enough.
-Yeah, definitely.
-Even well into her, you know, as a nonagenarian.
Maybe I was -- -Right.
-Clearing the path for myself as I'm now...
Hopefully. Hopefully, you know.
-Really. From your lips to God's ears.
-Exactly. -Yeah.
-Exactly. And so, there was that,
so that was very intimate. But other parts of the book,
like understanding the fallout from the Soviet Union.
What happened in Berlin?
What were the -- what was Berlin in the 90s
like when Ivanito -- -Right.
-Landed there, you know, kind of ejected from Moscow
for various reasons? So, yes.
And I, in fact, I did have some research already done
as it were because my pre --
the book previous to this one is called Here in Berlin
and for that I spent several months in Berlin
walking around, doing research, reading a lot,
haunting cafés and libraries alike.
And so, I was able to draw on some of that,
much of that that wasn't used in that book
as the underpinning for this book,
as the place Berlin,
as the place where everyone ultimately gathers.
And Berlin as a symbol of a place that was leveled,
they called it "jahr null" in German, year zero,
and reinvented itself from the ground up
and which I felt in a way
was what these characters were doing.
In the wake of all this dislocation
they were actually continually reinventing themselves,
figuring out to whom and where they belonged,
what their allegiances were now and how they shifted,
that it was no longer fixed, their identities were fixed
but as malleable as the times that they lived in.
In other words, the maps,
the borders that they grew up with no longer applied.
-Right. And one of the things
that I thought was so interesting
was the way you described
through Celia's experiences in Cuba
what the breakup of the Soviet Union
meant to the people living in Cuba,
which I don't think we often think about, you know.
-Yes. Yes.
-You know and how -- -We don't realize
just how close they were intertwined.
-Yeah. Yeah.
-And just how much Cuba depended on the Soviet Union
for literally daily remittances, it was over --
easily over a million dollars a day. I think --
I don't even know what the latest figures on that were.
But yes, what ensued in Cuba was a panic,
you know, like the plug was pulled on their revolution
and suddenly lights, gas, agriculture,
everything was in jeopardy.
-Yeah.
-On average people lost 30 pounds in the first year
of what they called the special period, you know,
and those were very dire times.
And I went to Cuba several times in those years
because I had family there
and they were desperate, you know, so.
-Yeah.
-Yeah and so people don't even realize, you know,
the unintended consequences -- -Right.
-Of political events, of war, things you can't imagine
and how they trickle down -- -Yeah.
And I thought the other headline news
that you bring in to Vanishing Maps
is Elián Gonzalez, his experiences,
and people will remember that he was the little boy who came,
his mother died on the journey over,
the 90 miles between Cuba and the US.
And the big fight over whether he should stay
in the United States with his drunken uncles
whether he should go back to Cuba to live with his father.
And, you know, the anti-Communist feeling
still so prevalent in Miami -- in Florida, but Miami is,
you know, is where it set, you know, is just so --
it just brought back, it hasn't disappeared,
I mean it's still going on today, you know.
-It is Nancy, astonishingly.
Although, I would say it's most virulent
among the older generations,
say you know my parents' generation,
they're in their late 80s. And although,
if you grew up in Miami as many of my cousins did,
it is a bit -- it is something of a hot -- political hothouse.
So, you grow up in those, you know,
the beliefs of your elders become part of your sensibility
without you even realizing it
because there's nothing to challenge it.
-Right.
-Like when I grew up, I grew up in New York,
so yes at home it was 1950s Cuba but I walked out the door
and I was in Brooklyn and Manhattan
and everything that my ex, you know, all of my experiences
were offering counter narratives to --
-Right. -To the beliefs at home.
So, but I think that's changing with the younger generations
and also with the subsequent waves of migration from Cuba.
We're talking about a cohort sadly that is dying off now.
What the future will bring overall
to the Cuban American community and its diaspora,
you know, we can only hope to crackle but not predict.
-So, the cousins who all end up in Berlin one way or another,
made their way to Berlin one way or another,
include Ivanito who was the little boy
who was kidnapped really by his aunt out of Cuba
and taken to Brooklyn and he becomes a translator,
a brilliant translator, brilliant at languages,
but what he really loves,
the person who I believe thinks he is,
is a drag queen, Ivanita.
And one of the cousins, Pilar, comes to Berlin with her son
and the relationship between the uncle and Azul --
am I pronouncing that at least a little bit --
-Yes, it's lovely.
-Okay. That relationship I thought was so lovely.
Gosh, you're good at those relationship things.
I mean, I think you did a great -- and the twins,
there's twins that run in the family and these two --
and this set of twins, women, meet by chance in Berlin.
So, you kind of get the feeling that Berlin in the 90s
was the place
where everything was happening and the place to be,
they meet across a crowd in a club and see one another
and it's like looking in the mirror.
I love that story.
-Well, thank you. Thank you.
Yes, I think you're right about Berlin in the 90s
was the place where everything could happen.
I think in a way it paralleled Weimar Berlin in the 20s --
-Right.
-Which drew artists from around the world
and there were no rules.
The rule was that there was no rules,
that there were no rules. And so,
it was a big free for all then after the fall of the wall.
And so, these kinds of accidents and coincidences were common,
I mean unexpected but common.
And so, it ultimately felt like the perfect backdrop
for this collision and ultimately collusion
of all of these disparate cousins.
-Right. In your mind do you know why the girl --
the cousin, the twins were separated?
Why they had not been -- I mean in your mind
because it's one -- -Yeah.
-Of those things that you leave open-ended?
-Right, untended. -Yeah.
-Yeah, you know, I was surprised by that
other twin popping up too and I thought I would --
I thought, I mean I wanted to resolve it
before the end of the book and I couldn't.
I really couldn't figure it out. And one of the twins' mothers
is kind of languishing in a nursing home
and kind of against revealing any secrets
and the other mother was dead.
And so, I'm not sure they find out
or at least, I don't know yet.
Who knows, I may have to write another book.
-Yeah, right.
-Find out what happens to them, you know.
-Well, I love -- what I loved
was the uncertainty.
I love the uncertainty of the ending in Dreaming
in Cuban and I love the uncertainty of the twins' fates.
And did you get pushback from, you know, your editor about,
you know, needing to tie it up more neatly?
Do you know what I mean?
-Yes. No, I didn't. -That's great.
-I mean I felt more pressure on myself
to at least figure it out.
But like Celia, which is how we started off the conversation,
I didn't really know.
I mean I could have gone one way or the other.
-Right.
-And with these twins whose origin story
is still unknown to me,
I have theories about what happened but I'm not sure.
I'm not sure yet.
-Yeah. Do you think you'll continue
writing about that family one way or another or --
-I'm not really sure.
I'm very interested in Azul, you know.
-Yes.
-Who at six has so much residence with uncle
and his drag queen brilliant translator uncle.
-And his -- and Ivanito's mother who appears.
-His mother, right. His crazy grandmother. I mean --
-Yeah.
-He's only six. -Right.
-And he's already absorbing so much,
including a vivid imagination including --
I mean he starts seeing ghosts and either having dreams
or traveling with this ghost to the Arctic.
All kinds of things happen and so,
I don't think there's anyone
who is rife for a follow up -- -Yeah. Yeah.
-It might be him. -Yes.
-But again, I'm not sure.
I never know what's going to happen.
I mean that's really the story of my life here.
-Well, I know that I and the rest of your many,
many, many fans
are thrilled to see Celia and the family come back
and thrilled to read Vanishing Maps
and just look forward to many more Cristina Garcia novels.
-Oh, well you're very kind. Thank you so much.
-Thank you so much for being on the show.
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