Tangled Web UK Review December 2000
Bodega Dreams by
Ernesto Quinonez
pbk out November 00
(Serpents Tail)
at £10
Black America has long produced writers of note, not a few majoring in
crime. Now it seems the process is well under way in the USA’s 30-odd
million strong Hispanic community. And whilst neither the novel The Tattooed Soldier (Hector Tobar) or this one can really be described as crime novels, at least in the Julian Symons definition, both writers come from the right, that is, the wrong side of the tracks, where crime is about the only game there is.
This book has no chapters, only ‘rounds’. For the realities of Spanish Harlem’s El Barrio (the neighbourhood) have confronted Chino, the central figure, throughout his brief life. “So what if someone broke your nose in a fight. You were ugly anyway. Your life meant shit from the start. It was as if you had given up on the war and decided to charge the tanks with your bare fists.”
In spite of all the difficulties, survived with the help of childhood friend Sapo, now a full-time hood, Chino and the other key characters, unconventionally, confront the future with optimism. There is Chino himself, his church-going new wife Blanca and the night school classes upon which their hopes of bettering themselves and their community depend. And there is Willy Bodega, local drug baron. But, again, Willy is no noir cliché. He too has ambitions for the neighbourhood, rooted in the late ’60’s socialist idealism of Spanish Harlem’s Young Lords. And in Chino he recognises someone who could help him, not only in his plan to renovate the neighbourhood with the profits from his drug deals, but also with a personal problem or two...
Quinoñez works through this situation, packing his prose with vivid vignettes of Barrio life, exploring the conflicting demands of family and friendship, religion and reality, idealism and survival. And in the masterly if melodramatic climax, he shows how myths are born, and idealism is handed down to a new generation.
Despite a few nods towards Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, Quiñonez is his own man, sharp and streetwise, writing both reflectively and with the clarity and passion that you might expect of a writer whose college tutor was Walter Mosley. Another highly promising Latino writer. Check him out.
(
Bob Cornwell
)
