Monkey Hunting [Hardcover]

 

 

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MONKEY HUNTING, Cristina Garcia's third novel is like her previous two in that it is multi-generational (and contains the dreaded "family tree" at the beginning of the book); it is unlike her previous two in that MONKEY HUNTING concentrates on male protagonists rather than on female.

MONKEY HUNTING begins in the year 1857 in Amoy, China when twenty-year old Chen Pan flees his famine-stricken village in search of women and gambling. One of the women he meets dares him to be brave enough to board a ship for Cuba where, she assures him, he will not only meet more women than in China, he'll make his fortune as well.

Once on board the ship, Chen Pan realizes that he's not sailing to a better life but into slavery. Garcia is mirroring history here; during the early and middle part of the 19th century many Chinese were taken to Cuba where they lived a life that was, by all accounts, even worse than the life led by African slaves in the US. Chen Pan, however, turned out to be one of the "lucky ones." He escaped from the sugar cane fields of rural Cuba and made his way to Havana where he set up an antique/curio shop known as the Lucky Find. Eventually, he purchases a black slave named Lucrecia and, though they never marry, they live out their days in love and have three children: Desidero, who grows up hating everything even remotely Chinese; Caridad, who plays little part in MONKEY HUNTING; and Lorenzo, an adventurer and the favorite of both Chen Pan and Lucrecia.

Although many descendants of Chen Pan make their way through the pages of MONKEY HUNTING, the book really concentrates on only three: Chen Pan, himself: Chen Fang, Chen Pan's intellectual granddaughter who is born and raised in China and, by the way, raised as a boy; and Domingo Chen, who escapes Castro's Cuba with his father and flees to New York only to find a worse hell in Vietnam. It is Chen Pan's story, however, that forms the "backbone" of MONKEY HUNTING, the one that binds the other stories and forms the through line of the book. And, the sections that detail Chen Pan's life are by far the very best, especially the ones that deal with his early sorrows and his love for and his life with Lucrecia. The stories of both Chen Fang and Domingo were, I thought, rushed and given short shrift, something that is definitely not to this book's credit. MONKEY HUNTING could have been twice the length it is and still not have been overwritten.

MONKEY HUNTING is a slim book at only 250 pages, yet it jumps from Cuba in 1860 to New York in 1968 to Shanghai in 1924. While Garcia makes these shifts in her narrative with some degree of ease and elegance, I think most readers are going to find themselves disoriented at times, and, worse yet, emotionally detached from the characters. I know I did. Garcia seems to have a definite aversion to linear storytelling and, while I often like non-linear books myself, I don't like it when this structure is imposed upon a novel as a stylistic device rather than letting the story evolve naturally, linear or not. Of course, I can't say why Garcia chose to tell her story in a non-linear fashion, but it seems a bit "gimmicky" to me and I felt it subtracted very much from true emotional engagement with the characters. While I felt some empathy with Chen Pan, especially during descriptions of his love for Lucrecia, I just couldn't feel any empathy with either Chen Fang or Domingo. Their characters were far too "sketchy." I don't think any novelist, no matter how talented, can convey more than one hundred years of turmoil (including the Boxer Rebellion, China's Cultural Revolution, Cuba's struggle for independence and the Vietnam War) in such a slim book.

Garcia's prose is beautiful. I found a few phrases and metaphors that I thought were overwritten and perhaps "purple," as when Garcia describes a woman's eyes as being "unusually large, the whites clean as starched napkins." To me, comparing someone's eyes to starched napkins seemed quite a stretch, but overall, Garcia is a beautiful and lyrical writer. MONKEY HUNTING isn't as hallucinatory and dreamy and mystical as her debut novel DREAMING IN CUBAN nor is it as over-the-top as THE AGUERO SISTERS. MONKEY HUNTING, I think, is written in a more "down to earth" style, but he prose is still beautiful.

I have to wonder, though, if Garcia, because of her ability to write so beautifully, somehow sacrifices substance for style. Her characters are simply too sketchy, too placid, too fatalistic to ever really "come alive."

When all is said and done, the best thing I can say about MONKEY HUNTING is that it contains some very beautiful, very exquisite prose and lush description. The characters, however, simply never came alive and because they didn't, beautiful as this book is, I couldn't find anything in it that remained with me longer than an hour or two.

I would recommend MONKEY HUNTING only to die hard fans of Cristina Garcia and to those who don't mind the sacrifice of substance for a very beautiful, but very fragmentary, writing style.

Chen Pan's life begins in China, where he is duped and forced into slavery on the sugar cane fields of Cuba but whose enduring spirit and luminous life force enables him to escape, start a profitable business and begin a family with his beloved Lucrecia, also a former slave and societal outcast.
Cristina Garcia paints a broad yet intimate portrait of Chen, Lucrecia and his sons over a period of a hundred years. Her prose style here is not as fat and gorgeous as in her "Aguero Sisters" but she definitely has her moments: ""The hot tea burned through him. He lowered his face over the steaming cup, then watched as vaporous bits of his features beaded on the low-slung ceiling...to work the sugarcane fields, his father told him was to go wooing mournful ghosts."
In "Monkey Hunting," Garcia casts the outcast as a hero: a man with dreams who makes it in a new, hostile world through his hard work and good deeds. That he is not fully accepted by this society in which he hopes to be assimilated, only makes his plight nobler and closer to the reality of the world in which we now live.

In her first novel in six years, National Book Award nominee Garcia ("Dreaming in Cuban") explores the Chinese-Cuban experience across the span of four generations and more than a century. The novel opens in 1857 China. Impoverished, childless farmer Chen Pan, looking for work in the city, agrees to exchange his daily struggle for dreams of riches and adventure in exotic, tropical Cuba.

Crammed into the hold of a stinking boat with similarly tricked men, Chen realizes he has failed his duty to his wife and mother. Chen endures, but lack of food, water, space, and hope drive others to suicide. When a melon grower jumps overboard, "the furling waves received him with indifference. The melon-grower had been an orphan and a bachelor. No destiny would be altered but his."

Chen is sold into eight years indentured servitude cutting sugar cane. He and the other Chinese men live as slaves among the African slaves, sharing in their beatings and body-breaking work. After killing a brutal overseer, falling in love with a slave who is raped and sold, and witnessing the recapture and mutilation of a group of Chinese escapees, Chen escapes and hides in the woods.

At this point the novel jumps to New York City in 1968 where Domingo Chen and his father are trying to survive on menial jobs after fleeing Castro's Cuba. His father mired in depression, Domingo lives day to day, chasing girls and sharpening his wardrobe.

Though Garcia soon returns to Chen - who establishes a successful second-hand shop in Havana, buys and frees a slave woman, Lucrecia, and her child - the riveting bond between character and reader has loosened and the novel has changed. Garcia moves between old Chen and his descendants - the granddaughter in China he never knows he has, his herbalist doctor son Lorenzo, who returns to China to study for 10 years, Lorenzo's sons, Domingo and his tour in Vietnam. The book is now more about the immigrant experience, the dreams, heartbreaks, the mingling of blood and traditions, than it is about one man or even one family.

Chen is a complex, deliberative character, a gentle, steely man with an edge of desperation who embraces his life with passion, all the more ardent for its depths of regret, fear, ambition and loneliness. Lucrecia, too, is fully, deftly developed and their love is memorable, almost heroic in its quiet consideration. But the other characters, despite Garcia's empathy, and the clarity of the spare, telling, vignettes, remain acquaintances. There simply isn't room enough in this 250-page novel.

But so beautifully does Garcia write and so dramatic are the times and crises she portrays, that this is almost a quibble. She brings alive a thought-provoking world of change, culture, dreams and cross-culture melding. The novel will grip you even if its individuals don't.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Time, Change, Loss and Memory
From his village in China, Chen Pan, aged twenty, is tricked into indentured servitude, shipped across the oceans to Cuba, and for the next few years he will work as a slave... Read more

Published on Jun 5 2003 by Louis N. Gruber

4.0 out of 5 stars Hungry ghost
Cristina Garcia gathers the Cuban-Chinese experience up in her graceful embrace in this lovely novel that covers more than a century and a familyï¿s adventures in Cuba,... Read more

Published on April 15 2003 by Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader

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