Spokane, WA: Willow Springs Books, 2019. 170 pages. $19.95.
We enter Dariel Suarez’s Cuba beside the empty bed of a truck. The truck is waiting for a contraband giraffe, as is Arquímedes, the man helping steal it from the zoo. Arquímedes is a practical man, worrying whether the defecation of an alarmed giraffe will leave a trail from the crime scene, but the crime turns out to be easy and the trouble comes when he gets the giraffe back to his wealthy Cuban client and the tourist guests who want to hunt it. In Suarez’s debut story collection, A Kind of Solitude, a portrait emerges of Cuba as a place where people live in the spaces between what systems are supposed to do and what they actually do. Suarez’s characters face crises of morality, hope, and resistance, and those spaces often allow their problems to magnify beyond their control.
While it would be generous to call Arquímedes’s lapses a moral gray area, he is a sympathetic thief, the only one with grave misgivings about the fate of the giraffe. But he is willing to rationalize those misgivings away:
It was good to define the key pieces of the job, separating himself from them as much as his conscience afforded. In fact, just before falling asleep, he’d concluded that Hansel was actually a dumb animal, leading a lonely, malnourished existence at the zoo.
Likewise, the narrator of “The Comforter” has more reservations than his coworkers about taking supplies from the mental health institutions where he works, but can’t resist the temptation to take a hospital comforter to warm him and his girlfriend through an upcoming cold front. That indiscretion turns fateful when the cold front, worse than expected, kills a number of the patients and he is tasked with the hushed disposal of the bodies, leaving him haunted by a cold that “had settled over the furniture like a presence.” The narrator writes that a part of him “hoped that it wouldn’t leave, that even after I had moved out, it would remain with me as a sort of company.”
Writing about moral failures can risk preachiness, but A Kind of Solitude avoids any sense of pedantry through the full lives it gives its subjects. Suarez’s characters are believable, compelling, sympathetic, and memorable. They range from a young Adonis to a metal vocalist to an old postal worker. They are urban and rural, patriotic and disaffected, connected or vulnerable and by then end of the collection you feel you’ve have had a tour of the nation’s complexity, at odds with the often simplified American conception of Cuba as a dance hall and a car show.
The lives of these characters are informed more than anything by a low-grade but constant poverty. Some resign themselves to it, like Eloy, the old postman in “Marching Men,” mixing his nightly drink of brown sugar dissolved in water and angling for a color TV from his neighborhood association. Others struggle against it, like the band members in “Primal Voice,” who “loved the energy, the release and escape from the dull reality of living in Cuba, from the poverty, which was seldom extreme but always present.” That story is the collection’s most spacious, novelistic in scope, and one of its finest. Each of the five members of titular metal band is well drawn, as are the complicated relationships between them as they debate the value of resistance and how to orient themselves to a heavy-handed government—a government that, in other stories, imprisons a soon-to-be father on trumped-up bureaucratic charges and disrupts a widow’s life because she won’t tell the police who sold her an illegal wheel of cheese.
Hanging over most of the characters is the question of whether to leave Cuba. Just as often that’s an eventuality and the question is less whether to leave than when and how and what will drive them to it. In many of the stories, there is a speedboat lurking in the imagination of the one character or another. Never is that dilemma more present than in “Hope,” a story in which the faith of Vladimir’s mother keeps her on the island while he arranges his plans to leave. “Living in this country is like repeating the same day over and over until you die,” he tells her. “Not even the Pope will change that.” The country itself is presented throughout the collection as a sort of inadequate parent, absent when it needs to be present, controlling when it needs to be flexible, and always without enough food in the fridge.
Despite all the light it shines on troubles in Cuban life, A Kind of Solitude is a love letter to Cuba as much as it as a critique of it, full of the heartbreak that comes from loving something flaws and all. Suarez’s deep feel for his setting calls to mind Daniel Alarcón’s Peru or Stuart Dybek’s Chicago. As with those writers, Suarez fuses setting with plot and character in an intricate and inextricable way. His prose is more in the manner of writers like Alice Munro or William Trevor, honed and elegant, beautiful when it needs to be but never trying to steal the show from the nuanced exploration of the collection’s characters.
A Kind of Solitude is a debut that doesn’t feel like a debut, as its stories are full-bodied and confident, and read like the work of a seasoned master. More importantly, they read like the work of a writer with a place to explore and something to say about it. In fact, the collection has many things to say about it, without ever trying to have the final word or give the illusion of a unitary answer. Capturing the complexity of any nation is perhaps not a reachable goal. That well is bottomless. But when you read a collection like A Kind of Solitude, there’s no doubt that you’ve drunk deeply from it.
