Ana Menendez’s latest novel, “The Apartment,” excavates the history of a single Miami housing unit. Born to Cuban exiles in Los Angeles, she is also the author of the novel “Loving Che,” “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd” and two other books:
uses a single flat — Apartment 2B in an Art Deco complex in Miami, to be precise — to lay down a palimpsest of history through its charged materials, beginning in the distant past with an Indigenous woman gathering sea turtle eggs and proceeding through a succession of tenants over the last century.
Menéndez wants you to see the unit itself as a character that connects the tenants’ stories, a repository of different kinds of energy: Cruelty, dreams, lust, creativity, loneliness. Brief interstitials signify 2B’s experiences and lingering emotions. First, after the Appletons leave , the apartment’s “unseen eye” sweeps the walls, taking in even a drop of paint Sophie spilled one tense afternoon.
The connections make clearer sense when you realize the ideas in Menéndez’s inanimate narrative voice derive from psychology and the human need for a home base. 2B dreams its dreams, we realize a bit later, while it houses a young man named Lenin Garcia. Named by his Cuban parents in a moment of revolutionary fervor, Lenin arrived in Florida with nothing and learned to survive through sex work.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Rosie O'Donnell Says Menendez Brothers Should Be Freed, Has Grown 'Very Close' with LyleRosie O'Donnell is calling for Lyle & Erik Menéndez to be free -- the brothers were convicted of murdering their parents and sentenced to life imprisonment in one of the 1st major true-crime dramas to capture the nation back in the early 90s (via toofab)
Read more »
3 San Antonio officers charged with murder in fatal shooting of woman at her apartmentThree San Antonio police officers were charged with murder on Friday less than 24 hours after they fatally shot a woman during a police call, the police chief announced.
Read more »
Fire at San Jose apartment complex leaves dozens of residents displacedA 4-alarm fire left about 30 people displaced Friday night in San Jose. A dog living in one of the units died in the fire.
Read more »