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Boarding Home (2004)

by Guillermo Rosales(Favorite Author)

3.8 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

3518223836 (ISBN13: 9783518223833)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Suhrkamp

review 1: To walk into The Halfway House is to inhabit this particular microcosm of misfits somewhere in Miami, people for whom “nothing more can be done.” The experience can be harrowing, and yet, at times, it appears as though Eros might win over Thanatos. We follow the life of William Figueras, a Mariel refugee from Cuba with a history of mental illness (much like the author himself), as he descends into this modern day inferno, yet he’s not crazy, but rather deeply aware of the abuse and the sordid conditions of his new “home.” He, who “by the age of fifteen [had:] read the great Proust, Hesse, Joyce, Miller, [and:] Man” stays afloat by reading from a book of English poets, whose poems are peppered throughout the novel, until he meets Frances, whose body “while c... moreheated by life, still has some curves.” She, like Figueras, was once an enthusiastic young Cuban communist teaching peasants to read, but has since become “broken inside.” But Frances is also an artist, she carries around a folder with her drawings, “worthless things,” but Figueras is deeply moved by them and recognizes that like him, she is redeemed by art. For a moment, there’s a glimmer of hope as the pair plots to escape the nut house in order to become a normal couple, before coming to the unexpected ending. (The rest of my review will come out soon in Literal, a gorgeous bilingual binational magazine on arts, culture and current events).
review 2: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita… In the middle of my life’s journey, I came to myself in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. That’s how Dante’s Inferno begins, and this is pretty much the starting point for Rosales’ hellish little novel about Cuban exile William Figueras. After his American relatives greet him at the airport, expecting a successful man of letters but finding a bitter and irrational husk gibbering insults, Figueras finds himself shunted to a succession of psychiatric wards and asylums, winding up at long last in the circle of hell realized by a converted Miami home packed to the gills with dazed and suffering souls, watched over with casual cruelty by the demons of this place – a sports fishing capitalist and his degenerate, abusive flunky. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Or as Figueras says, “The house said ‘boarding home’ on the outside, but I knew that it would be my tomb.” The book is completely unflinching in its depiction of these lower depths, and the hapless castaways that populate its cells and hallways, enfeebled by age, insane, crippled, or simply abandoned by the living, breathing world that exists all around them, and yet seems at an unbridgeable remove from their sordid, shambling existence. But the reek of urine or the tang and stench of other vile bodily frailties and exigencies are not the most disturbing thing. For many readers the book will cross a threshold when the narrator himself, a man of learning if questionable sanity, takes part in the cruel treatment of his fellow inmates. This happens in Dante also, when the narrator does terrible things to the damned like kicking at heads that emerge from the brimstone, but Dante enjoys a rock-hard certainty about the damned and deserving status of his victims, while for Rosales/Figueras, life seems to have more to do with chance than karma. There is hope here, too – the kind of hope that noir buffs such as me can spot a mile off – and a romance, of sorts. I shouldn’t say more, but I hope I’ve given enough of a window on the various debasements of this book that when I say the book is beautiful, it will resonate with the sort of reader who knows what that means, and drive away the rest. It is beautiful, not like a car crash, or like a ruin, or like cancer. It is beautiful like Dante. less

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