Anything but Love

Rating:
Summary: A bi-cultural relationship bordering on insanity
Review: Anything but love is a very interesting look at love and lust seen through the haze of having lived in two cultures. By having the double perspective, Frank uses his memory to glorify parts of his past, and to try to explain some of the more troubled parts of his adulthood. A very good look at relationships, and a rich tapestry of bi-cultural observations. Frank and Cat are typical of many areas of our lives which we try to equally remember and forget. A unique read.

Rating:
Summary: A bi-cultural relationship bordering on insanity
Review: Anything but love is a very interesting look at love and lust seen through the haze of having lived in two cultures. By having the double perspective, Frank uses his memory to glorify parts of his past, and to try to explain some of the more troubled parts of his adulthood. A very good look at relationships, and a rich tapestry of bi-cultural observations. Frank and Cat are typical of many areas of our lives which we try to equally remember and forget. A unique read.

Rating:
Summary: Anything But Love
Review: Anything But Love, Gustavo Pérez Firmat (Arte Público Press:Houston, 2000)

Cuban exiles talk of nothing but their homeland,restrospectively wanna-be hippies drool nostalgia over "the goodold days" of the sixties, Jews are compelled to retell the story of the Exodus every year, and lovers are dangerously preoccupied with their own and their partners' sexual histories. We are all obsessed with our memories, and this is not always such good news. Worse, we're eaten up with envy when left outside the warm circle of another's tribe, but frequently insist on arming ourselves to patrol the borders of our own territories.

Gustavo Pérez Firmat plays, flirts, and wrestles with these and other issues in the novel Anything But Love. His work - which jealously demands your complete attention and successfully insists to be read all at once - begins with a funny, sexy, smart and edgy conversation in a Miami cafe. Frank Guerra's uncle and father are warning him not to leave his wife, Marta, for "what's her name." The novel's humor is soon mixed with lyrical, gorgeous meditations on language, infatuation, and "neura...[the] family's catch-all term for everything from PMS to schizophrenia."

Some of the observations here have been made many times before, but these are subjects that can bear up under many visits. If you fall for sentences like the following, you will keep reading. "Our hearts were like our families: They didn't understand us. They were trapped by memory, they belonged to people we no longer knew."

When the reader is not only seduced but committed, the story gets very, very weird. What seems, early on in the novel, a strange, irrelevant noise from far off turns out to be a full-blown nightmare. It's heading straight for the protagonists, and us. Unlike seasoned Miami residents, we are unprepared for the hurricane. The wreckage has been washing up in my dreams for several nights.

There's much to react to, and against, in this book. ...

Distortions abound. Frank Guerra, the sometime Jew, "remember[s] those phrases from the copy of the Pirki Abot that Marta had given him: 'If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, when?' He interpreted the two if-then clauses as a Talmudic license to cheat." Wow. Has he deliberately left out the crucial "If I am only for myself, who am I?" or does he just not hear what's not convenient? We don't get to know. In this maddeningly and delightfully ambiguous book, questions are constantly raised and not a one is answered. I like that.

The ambiguity is fitting for a protagonist who constantly wonders about the truth: what is it, why do we want it when it is certain to hurt us, and can you write a textbook with only true sentences? Guerra "realizes that the verb for lying - mentir - is almost identical to the verb for naming - mentar." He doesn't know what to make of that, but buys his lying wife a beautiful bowl and fills it with limes, because "lime juice [is] his idea of truth serum." Of course, nothing is solved so easily.

When is an "anything but love" story just a story about two people, and when is it a dire warning against mating doubting Guerras with explosive Thomases? Why do we keep looking for more, for the unnamable, when all we (really) want is safety?

What makes this novel different from (not all, but so many) others? Mostly, its ferociously fine writing. In the whole book, there are four words that I'd argue with: "cigarette packs" on page 116 over-explains a joke, and the phrase "flesh-colored," which has been rightfully discarded, comes (yes) as a nasty jolt on page 139. (But perhaps a nasty jolt is just what Pérez Firmat intended.) Throughout, the writing is stunning and very smart. Entire chapters demand to be re-read; the book is full of serious double and quadruple-entendres. One of these is found in the second to last line of the book, leaving the reader hanging, yet grateful. This sometimes hilarious, frequently disturbing and always compelling book deserves to be read. Please, because I want to know what everyone else thinks it means.