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WORK TITLE: The Mortifications
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1982
WEBSITE: http://derekpalacio.com/
CITY: Ann Arbor
STATE: MI
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://derekpalacio.com/about/ * http://nouvellabooks.com/authors/derek-palacio/ * http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2117619/derek-palacio
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1982, in Evanston, IL; married Claire Vaye Watkins.
EDUCATION:Ohio State University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator and writer. Mojave School, Pahrump, NV, codirector; Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM, M.F.A. program faculty member; has taught in Lewisburg, PA, and Ann Arbor, MI.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short stories to anthologies, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, Anchor Books, 2013, and to literary journals, including Puerto del Sol and Kenyon Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Derek Palacio is a contemporary short-fiction writer. He was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1982 and grew up in Greenland, New Hampshire. His fiction has appeared in Puerto del Sol and the Kenyon Review, and his story “Sugarcane” was included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013. Palacio is codirector, with wife Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, a nonprofit creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada, and a faculty member of the Institute of American Indian Arts’ M.F.A. program. He earned his own M.F.A. in creative writing from Ohio State University. He has recently lived and taught in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and Ann Arbor, Michigan.
In 2013 Palacio published his debut novella, How to Shake the Other Man. The tale centers on Javier, who left home in the Dominican Republic seven years ago tired of his father condemning him for being homosexual. He finds himself in New York working the streets when he meets Marcel, an older, charismatic Cuban businessman who owns many street coffee vendors. Marcel takes Javi under his wing, helping him feel more comfortable about his sexuality and starting a passionate relationship with him. To help keep Javi around and give him some direction in life, Marcel asks his younger brother Oscar to train Javi how to box.
Happiness for Marcel and Javi proves fleeting, as the day before Javi’s first boxing match, Marcel is murdered. Overcome with grief, Javi does not want to fight; in fact, he wants to flee New York entirely, but boxing was what Marcel wanted for him. Incidentally, Oscar does not want Javi to fight either, believing the boy is not skilled enough yet to last long in the ring. Bound to each other in grief and a desire for purpose, Javi and Oscar bond in brotherhood and adapt to Marcel’s absence. Javi strives to be the man Marcel knew he could be.
On the Heavy Feather Review Web site, Patrick Trotti remarked that Derek Palacio’s debut book “is top notch and reaffirms everything I’ve already thought about the in-between novella form.” Palacio “has staked a claim for himself, emerging as one of the freshest young voices to come out of the fiction landscape in years,” said Trotti. Palacio’s characters learn that anyone can run from their problems, but there is more respect and dignity in moving toward a better future. Online at Necessary Fiction, Brian Seemann said in his review: “Palacio’s ending provides the sort of resolution any strong literary piece demands; it offers an external culmination of events while also continuing to plunge into the internal conflicts of character.”
Palacio next wrote The Mortifications in 2016. The story focuses on the Encarnacion family, who are caught up in the 1980 Mariel boatlift. Patriarch Uxbal refuses to leave his tomato farm, but mother Soledad wants to flee. She takes twelve-year-old twins Ulises and Isabel and eventually settles not in warm Miami, with the other diaspora, but in cold Hartford, Connecticut. She tries to survive away from Uxbal, and the children grow up with different memories of their father. Ulises becomes a tall, awkward Latin scholar whose memories shape his future. Isabel turns to Catholic mysticism. Soledad finds a tempestuous romance with Henri Willems, a Dutch tobacco farmer.
In an interview online at Fiction Writers Review, Palacio told Gabriel Urza that growing up in the United States, he thought Cuba had mythic qualities: “My father has shared his memories of the island with me, but they are few and fragmented, and he mostly remembers his youth in Miami.” Speaking of his books, Palacio said: “If anything feels shared between these works, for me it’s the fable-like quality of the stories, that these narratives are stand-ins for life, but not life itself. The Mortifications is my best effort to put into bodies and words the kind of toll, emotional and psychological, that longing for one’s home can exert on a person. It is not meant to be real, per se, only palpable and, I hope, enduring.”
Barbara Mujica observed in Washington Independent Review of Books: “The ‘mortifications’ of the title are the indignities that plague human existence—war, abandonment, isolation, fear. Yet Palacio also portrays the resilience that enables us to bear them. The battles between body and spirit, voice and silence, solitude and love that rage throughout the novel exhaust the characters.” According to Dinaw Mengestu in the New York Times: “The novel is invested in its literary allusions, which haunt the narrative almost as relentlessly as the past haunts the main characters, Soledad and her twin children, Isabel and Ulises.” In a review in BookPage, Michael Magras called the book a “devastating portrait of the realities we construct for ourselves, the parts of our history we choose to embrace and those we yearn to escape.” At Publishers Weekly, a contributor stated, “Perhaps strongest of all in this winning debut are the scenes set in Cuba: these humid and colorful pages sing with empathy.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, August 1, 2016, Mark Levine, review of The Mortifications, p. 27.
BookPage, October, 2016, Michael Magras, review of The Mortifications, p. 19.
New York Times, November 6, 2016, review of The Mortifications.
Publishers Weekly, July 4, 2016, review of The Mortifications, p. 36.
Xpress Reviews, September 9, 2016, Kristen Droesch, review of The Mortifications.
ONLINE
Chicago Review of Books, https://chireviewofbooks.com/ (October 7, 2016), review of The Mortifications.
Derek Palacio Home Page, http://derekpalacio.com (April 16, 2017).
Fiction Writers Review, http://fictionwritersreview.com/ (November 2, 2016), Gabriel Urza, author interview.
Fredericksburg.com, http://www.fredericksburg.com/ (November 26, 2016), review of The Mortifications.
Heavy Feather Review, https://heavyfeatherreview.com/ (May 7, 2013), Patrick Trotti, review of How to Shake the Other Man.
Necessary Fiction, http://necessaryfiction.com/ (February 17, 2014), Brian Seemann, review of How to Shake the Other Man.
NPR Web site, http://www.npr.org/ (October 6, 2016), review of The Mortifications.
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (December 9, 2016), review of The Mortifications.
Derek Palacio
Photo of Derek Palacio
Photo: © Dane Hillard
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Derek Palacio received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. His short story “Sugarcane” appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, and his novella How to Shake the Other Man was published by Nouvella Books. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor, MI, is the co-director, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, and serves as a faculty member of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program.
Derek PalacioDerek photo large
Derek Palacio was born in Evanston, IL, in 1982 but grew up in Greenland, NH. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. His work has appeared in Puerto del Sol and The Kenyon Review, and his story “Sugarcane,” was selected for inclusion in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013. He is the co-director, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, a non-profit creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. Currently, he lives and teaches in Lewisburg, PA, where he is completing a novel about a small Cuban family struggling to remain whole after fleeing the island as part of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift. He is also working on a collection of short stories relating to Cuba’s past, present and future.
ABOUT
Derek Palacio received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. His short story “Sugarcane” appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, and his novella, How to Shake the Other Man, was published by Nouvella Books. His debut novel, The Mortifications, is forthcoming in 2016 from Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group. He is the co-director, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor, MI, and is a faculty member of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program.
Photo by Dane Hillard
INTERVIEWS | NOVEMBER 02, 2016
Always Journeying: An Interview with Derek Palacio
"They were various versions of American realism, reflections of an American writing style that felt to me like a costume": Derek Palacio chats with Gabriel Urza about The Mortifications, his new novel.
by GABRIEL URZA
Derek Palacio’s debut novel, The Mortifications (Tim Duggan Books, 2016), is the story of a Cuban family broken apart during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift crisis. Uxbal Encarnación—father, husband, political insurgent—refuses to leave behind the revolutionary ideals of his homeland. Against his wishes, his wife Soledad flees with their young children, Isabel and Ulises, to America, leaving behind Uxbal for the promise of a better life. There, in the long shadow of their estranged patriarch, the exiled mother and her children begin a process of transformation. But just as the Encarnacións begin to cultivate a strange new way of life, Cuba calls them back. Uxbal is alive, and waiting. Exploring the estrangement of exile and the desire for one’s homeland, The Mortifications is large in scope and ambition.
Derek Palacio received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. His short story “Sugarcane” appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, and his novella, How to Shake the Other Man, was published by Nouvella Books. He is the co-director, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is a faculty member of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program.
I met Derek met in graduate school in 2009 at the Ohio State University MFA program. We both worked with each other on early drafts of our debut novels, and we’ve been friends since. Our conversation took place over email.
Interview:
Gabriel Urza: After reading your book last week, I noticed certain thematic similarities between The Mortifications and Gold Fame Citrus (Riverhead, 2015), which is your wife, Claire Vaye Watkins’, novel. In both books, there’s a woman in the middle of a love triangle, a sense of exodus, and an ideological and slightly demagogic partner (Uxbal/Levi) headed up against a more honest, nurturing one. There are also mother characters in both books who embody impulses of motherhood and sex (and even faith). And maybe most importantly, both books examine the way children are affected by these tensions, and how they’re subject to abandonment. So what’s up here? Is this just coincidence, or are you guys trying to work out some similar issues? Does this reflect on your own relationships or ideas of relationships?
cover-art_the-mortificationsDerek Palacio: What’s remarkable about those similarities is that neither Claire nor I read each other’s manuscripts until later in the process. We both tend to save each other as critics until the very end, so the comparisons you’re making do, in the end, feel coincidental. I was, however, surprised to see in Claire’s book such a direct evaluation of faith and religion, atheist that she is. This is not to say that atheists don’t consider those questions or ideas, but to say that Claire entered them as fully as any writer “of faith.” The cult leader you mention from her book, Levi, is, without a doubt, possessed by larger forces, and the chapter in the novel where he tells the story of his “conversion” is both beautiful and riveting—it finds an incredible balance between narcissism (the cult leader impulse) and rapture (a feeling of sincerely being called to greater things). My own book, in retrospect, is perhaps more concerned with endings than beginnings, inasmuch that when we meet Uxbal, the rebel patriarch, he is a failed revolutionary and religious leader. The days of his burning religious fervor are long gone. I did really enjoy working out much of Isabel’s storyline, however, and seeing how one might be called to the austere life of devotion she eventually leads. Both her revelation at the pond and Uxbal’s remembered sermon were moments when I could explore briefly the space between belief and objective reality. Perhaps more to the point, I learned how hard writing those scenes and character elements were, and even my efforts, as I now see them, do come up short. If anything, those sections of the novel cracked open for me a vein of narrative inquiry that I think I’ll have to return to and develop over a lifetime.
I should say that the kind of dynamic you’re speaking to has become much more present in my more recent work. The new project I am working on ostensibly follows the life of a Cuban-American swimmer who defects to Cuba when he fails to make the U.S. national swim team. That story, though, is being told through the perspective of a young woman who meets the swimmer the summer before his defection, so the larger narrative is as much about that young woman reconciling her identity with her sense of personal freedom in the world as much as it is about the swimmer. I think it would be a lie for me to say I would have discovered that voice and this perspective were Claire and her thinking and our discussions of literature not such a huge part of my life. At the very least, we share books all the time, which means we’re wading through the same waters. Some of that, no doubt, surfaces in the work.
This line of talk also asks another question: how much are you pulling from your own life to develop your work? Your own debut novel, All That Followed (Henry Holt, 2015), engages the history of the Basque country, outsiders, violence, and cultural displacement. I wonder, then, how you would describe the relationship between your life and your fiction. You yourself are Basque and have lived in northern Spain at times, and I wonder to what degree those experiences have either influenced or infiltrated your writing.
Though I grew up primarily in the US, the idea of Basque identity and politics has always been a part of my life; my mother is from Nevada but identifies heavily with her Basque ancestry, and my father is from Spain and has maintained very close ties with politicians, artists, and intellectuals from the Basque Country through his line of work. I also lived in the Basque Country or visited relatives when I was growing up and in college, and these visits all_that_followed_gabriel_urzaoften coincided with periods of political unrest and violence there. All of which is to say, I think the experience of seeing police shoot rubber bullets helped me write about police shooting rubber bullets.
And, at the same time, as you point out, I was also an outsider—when I’m in the Basque Country I’m still primarily, the American. And so to the extent that I’m writing about Basque characters, they’re purely fictionalized, from a factual standpoint. I will admit—like I suspect most writers might—that I share certain qualities or traits with my fictional characters, even if it’s only a small obsession or idiosyncrasy.
Similarly, your family is from Cuba, a history that certainly influences your writing, though, I remember that at the beginning of our MFA program most of your work was set in the US—Montana, or New England—and didn’t engage directly with your Cuban heritage. At a certain point, though, you seemed to leave the US behind in your work, and Cuba has become a centerpoint of your fiction. What prompted this change, and do you think this is something that is still in flux? What moments or people in your life brought you to write this story? What parts of you are most reflected in this book?
This is an interesting question, because when I look back over my really early writing, I do see more than a few efforts—mostly essays—at writing about my cubanidad. That seemed to go away for a number of years, and I think that’s because I wasn’t reading work by Cuban or Latin American authors. That changed in graduate school, when I found Reinaldo Arenas’ memoir Before Night Falls. It’s an amazing book, stylistically and structurally, and I loved the urgency of Arenas’ memories, the voice that was sharp and longing all at once. Really, he wrote about Cuba in a way that made me want to try again, perhaps with a little distance, through fiction as intermediary. After finishing his memoir, I delved more deeply in Latin American fiction in general, and I started researching the history of Cuba and what the island is like today. The material seemed ripe with possibility, as though it were an identity I had forgotten about and just rediscovered. I remember those other stories you mentioned above, the ones about Montana and New Hampshire. They were promising in some ways, but in retrospect they never seemed to move in a particular direction. I do remember feeling like a fraud when writing them (not an uncommon feeling, I’m sure, for folks trying to find some footing in an MFA program), as though I was wearing a literary mask of sorts. They were various versions of American realism, reflections of an American writing style that felt to me like a costume. The language and material of The Mortifications are akin to the language and material I found in the Latin American literary tradition (Arenas, Bolaño, Lispector, Márquez, García Zambra, Hijuelos, Rulfo), so falling into those works perhaps helped me discover and cultivate my current and lasting obsessions (Cuba, homelands, displacement, mysticism, et cetera).
9780983658580Finishing the novel and starting something new has given me the chance to really look back on it with fresh eyes, so it’s easy for me now to see what of myself made it into the book. Most obviously I gave my characters, especially Ulises and Isabel, my anxieties. After leaving Cuba, the island becomes a sort of dream to Ulises, and it’s hard for him to remember his home and even his father. He lives at a tremendous distance from Cuba, and certain parts of the book really address this: his faded memories of Uxbal, his sickness when he steps foot on the island, his needing a guide to simply go home. Ulises’ experience is the one I imagine for myself. I have notions of Cuba handed down to me from my father, but little else to go on. I have not been to Cuba before (I am going at the end of October), so I will be visiting as a tourist, and I will need someone else’s help so as not to get lost. It is the feeling of being drawn in by a place, but not recognizing it, or not feeling as though you could ever really be comfortable there, ever reconcile that history of distance and remove (which I think is a perpetual issue for people of diaspora). What I see of myself in Isabel is perhaps a bit more abstract. One of her major concerns is whether or not our faith in people and places can evolve in the face of change, whether or not those beliefs can find new meaning under new circumstances. This is also an element to my relationship with Cuba, one that I will finally explore in real life when I visit the island. I will be confronted by the reality of the country, and I will have to weigh that against the idea of the island I have built from my research and my father’s memories. I will have to build a new relationship with Cuba, both as a Cuban-American and as a writer, and that will no doubt be difficult (though I hope not as tragic is Isabel’s journey in the end).
All this makes me really want to know something: what is your relationship to your Basque heritage, and has it changed in the wake of your novel? Considering the somewhat tricky and painful material of your book—terrorism, a culture of violence, cyclic loss—I wonder what publication and subsequent reflection have revealed you about your Basque-ness.
More than I’d like to admit, I think the writing and publication of All That Followed was a litmus test for my “Basqueness.” I wonder if this is the same for you and The Mortifications. I had researched and been a part of Basque culture and politics enough that I thought I was getting things right—the feelings and experiences of people living in a very specific political moment. But I wasn’t sure that it was right, and I didn’t have the authority of having lived it all first hand. If someone that had lived it said, “You got it all wrong,” I’d have a hard time defending the book perhaps.
And in fact I had a friend from the Basque Country who read an advanced reader copy of the book and said, essentially, “We’ve all agreed not to talk about this time in our history, and you should abide by this agreement, too.” It was a moment that made me very much doubt my “Basqueness.” If I did truly understand the situation, he was implying, then I’d never have written the book. It made me aware of the freedom that comes from writing from the diaspora. I thought about his point for a long time, but ultimately I just couldn’t agree with him.
Since we’re asking personal questions: you were raised Catholic, but seemed to distance yourself from the religion at the same time that you were writing this book. The book certainly engages with religion, but ultimately seems to reach a secular conclusion. In what ways are you working out your own relationship to Catholicism in this book?
9781594634246Let’s be clear that I am still working out my relationship to Catholicism, and I expect to be doing so for the rest of my life. But I don’t mean that in a negative way, either. If anything, writing this book—especially the sections with Isabel, the mystic of the novel—have brought to the surface questions of faith that I have been interested in for a long time, which, I think, means I’ll be writing about faith for the rest of my life as well. I think in graduate school I might have described myself as “moving away” from religion, but in retrospect I think I was simply moving away from the church. But even that’s not entirely true—I do still enjoy attending mass when I’m somewhere new, when the strangeness helps the sacrament feel a little holy and unfamiliar again. Of course, I do have the same problems with the Catholic church as an institution that anyone might, but I am drawn still to the modes of belief specific to this faith: the emphasis on the body, the idea that suffering is central to the human experience, the sense of ritual. I also experience in my Catholicism a very intense sense of self-awareness. Catholics keep tabs, and while this can be humiliating, it can also be freeing. It can, I think, sometimes lead to an honest self-knowledge, and that’s valuable but hard to come by.
Isabel’s journey in the novel is something like this. Her questions are about devotion and persistence, and what it means when a person’s faith must change. And she does face her own limits, especially when coming face to face with the looming death of her father. She begins the novel traveling upward, so to speak, moving closer and closer to something like the infinite. But while she makes large gains early on, the closer she gets, the harder the going becomes, the smaller her gains. I am speaking abstractly, but that’s because I don’t have the language yet for the things I’m really trying to talk about. Really, Isabel confronts in the end the notion that the next phase of her faith will require a lifetime of work and prayer. The early devotions have clear ends and tangible goals. What she’s ultimately after does not, or it will require all of her. There’s a giving up involved, obviously a sacrificial reflection of the crucifixion. And that’s what maybe I understand better now. If I want to write about my faith and understand it better, I will have do that from now until the end. That’s a long way of saying I don’t think I can stop being Catholic, nor do I really want to.
Isabel does give up a lot in this novel, especially in terms of her body: first her labor, then her voice, and even her sexuality to some extent. And to be frank, there is a lot of sex in this book, and though it is never gratuitous, it’s often portrayed in surprising detail, exploring obsessions that occasionally touch on masochism. There’s the old Oscar Wilde quote, “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” And I think that your characters might often agree with Wilde. At one point, for example, the matriarch of the family describes her sex life with her new lover this way: “I’m more interested in what he’s capable of doing to me than I am in exploring his flesh. It sounds like I’m testing him, doesn’t it?” Can you talk about how sex functions in this novel, about what work you see it doing and why?
9780140157659The sex in the novel, in my mind, is part of a larger exploration of the relationship between the body and the mind. The title of the book points to this connection, and it suggests that some degradation of the flesh will be necessary for the characters to expand and engage with their spirituality. They each have their own faith (as I see it, Isabel’s is Catholicism, Soledad’s is the myth of Cuba, and Ulises’ is his attraction to fate), but for the interaction with that faith requires some corporeal measure: Ulises grows, receives a wound to the head, and burns his way through Cuba; Soledad suffers from breast cancer and strange, new sexual appetites; Isabel is muted, then physical ecstatic, and eventually chaste again. In each case, the trials of the mind are expressed through trials of the body. Still, sex does have a particular place in this novel, and I see it mostly in its failure to create. There’s no “rising from the ashes” in this novel: characters abandon their children, fail to forge love from sex, and turn a creative act into a destructive enterprise. In that sense, I suppose sex in this novel is about powerlessness. Or at least the limits of our power, that despite our most passionate efforts, some things are beyond our wanting.
I think the connection between sex and power, though, is perhaps even more striking, especially in the context of Basque terrorism, of kidnappings, of one’s body being the point at which politics become violent. I’m thinking especially of the scene in your novel where Mariana, a native of the Basque country who is having an affair with an American, touches herself at the beach when she knows a young boy is watching nearby. It’s a scene where Mariana attempts to move past the shame of her affair, and I remember it as particularly powerful in its understated movement. Do you think this dynamic between power and sex means something different in your work? That it has a different effect in the context of your novel’s particular kind of violence?
I remember you telling me to write that scene! And it was great advice, too. As I think you can confirm, I’m publicly a libertine but inwardly kind of a prude, and I always have a hard time writing sex directly into my fiction, even if it’s often a plot or character motivator. My prudish instinct is usually just to avoid the actual, bodily part of sex by dimming the lights as the clothes start coming off, and so I was really grateful for your advice to get some skin into a scene, even if it’s just innocuous masturbation. One day, I hope to get an actual vagina or penis or asshole on the page, but that’s still a ways off right now.
Derek Palacio
Derek Palacio
But to answer your question, I do think that sex and violence are often intertwined in my fiction. While I was writing All That Followed I happened upon this line by an old NFL defensive end, Deacon Jones, that really stuck with me: “Violence in its many forms is an involuntary quest for identity. When our identity is in danger, we feel certain that we have a mandate for war.”
Using the old Transitive Property of Equality from high school algebra, I think it’s safe to say that sex—like violence—is also often a quest for identity, a means of proving to ourselves that we exist. I think that you’re asking if the political violence in the book somehow translates to sex, and I believe it does. But that’s also because I see political violence as being inherently (and counterintuitively) deeply personal.
The Mortifications is also a political book, set against real historical events, but in a way the novel and its characters break with the strict reality that people often expect in “historical fiction.” In a recent review, Kirkus described your novel as “almost mythic in scope.” And certainly this description seems fitting: the novel loosely follows Homer’s Odyssey, with a husband and wife separated by conflict, suitors in pursuit of the estranged wife, and a son struggling to maintain a semblance of order in the absence of his father. Why did you choose this lens to tell this particular story about a Cuban family divided by politics? How closely did you feel you needed to keep to the Odyssey story, and did you feel it constraining the story in any way?
Because of the island setting and because of the lost characters, there seemed to be a natural relationship between the Odyssey and the novel, especially if you think of Cuban exiles and the Cuban diaspora as a people always in search of home, always journeying. When working on the manuscript, though, I tried not to feel constrained by the Odyssey’s structure or particulars, and I did my best to allow connections between that epic poem and my lesser work arise organically. For instance, it was by chance that Soledad decides to sew clothing for Isabel when she’s at the convent. I hadn’t known that would be her particular response, but afterwards it was easy to see how that might be a variation on Penelope’s plight, the struggle to un-weave the tapestry at her loom every night. But in all honesty, Cuba for much of my life has felt like its own myth. My father has shared his memories of the island with me, but they are few and they fragmented, and he mostly remembers his youth in Miami. If anything is similar, if anything feels shared between these works, for me it’s the fable-like quality of the stories, that these narratives are stand-ins for life, but not life itself. The Mortifications is my best effort to put into bodies and words the kind of toll, emotional and psychological, that longing for one’s home can exert on a person. It is not meant to be real, per se, only palpable and, I hope, enduring.
The Mortifications
Michael Magras
BookPage. (Oct. 2016): p19.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
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THE MORTIFICATIONS
By Derek Palacio
Tim Duggan
$27, 320 pages
ISBN 9781101905692
Audio, eBook available
DEBUT FICTION
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The Mortifications, Derek Palacio's beautifully written debut novel, begins in 1980, during the Mariel boatlift that took refugees from Cuba to the United States. Soledad Encarnacion packs her 12-yearold son, Ulises, and his twin sister, Isabel, onto an overcrowded lobster boat that carries them away from their village of Buey Arriba. Her husband, Uxbal, chooses to stay behind, but not without first trying to prevent his family's departure by holding Isabel ransom.
In Connecticut, Soledad becomes a court stenographer and attracts the attention of lawyers who find her exotic. She falls in love with Henri Willems, a Dutch horticulturalist who grows Cuba's Habano tobacco in the Connecticut River Valley.
At 17, Ulises, a budding Latin scholar, gets a job working in Henri's fields. The more devout Isabel volunteers with the terminally ill at Jude the Apostle. Soon, she takes a vow of chastity and silence and leaves for Guatemala to establish a school funded by the church. And all of this is before Soledad's diagnosis of breast cancer and a letter from Uxbal, who demands his family's return to Cuba.
The Mortifications is a devastating portrait of the realities we construct for ourselves, the parts of our history we choose to embrace and those we yearn to escape. In deceptively simple prose, Palacio writes movingly of dreams and family legacies and reminds us that, no matter how far away you travel, some aspects of one's ancestry are forever a part of you.
The Mortifications
Mark Levine
Booklist. 112.22 (Aug. 1, 2016): p27.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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The Mortifications. By Derek Palacio. Oct. 2016. 320p. Crown/Tim Duggan, $27 (9781101905692).
Ulises and Isabel Encarnacion, twin brother and sister, come from Cuba (as Marielitos) to the tobacco country of Connecticut along with their mother, Soledad; their father, Uxbal, a committed revolutionary, stays behind. Isabel initially becomes a nun and works, controversially, with the dying, while the physically imposing Ulises labors in the local tobacco industry with Soledad's paramour, the Dutch Henri Willems. Soledad is stricken with breast cancer and undergoes a double mastectomy but without diminishing her very profound sexuality, which is at the core of the novel. Isabel's disappearance forces Ulises (and, as it turns out, Isabel herself) back to the homeland, where they find Uxbal and reunite. The prose in this ambitious first novel is straightforward, and there is, surprisingly, very little sense of place, either of Cuba or the U.S., but Palacios characters keep one riveted to the complex story of exile and estrangement. --Mark Levine
The Mortifications
Publishers Weekly. 263.27 (July 4, 2016): p36.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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The Mortifications
Derek Palacio. Crown/Duggan, $27 (320p) ISBN 978-1-101-90569-2
At the heart of O'Henry-winner Palacios debut novel are the twins Ulises and Isabel Encarnacion. The twins' mother, Soledad, has fled Cuba with her children during the Mariel boat-lift of 1980, leaving their rebel father, Uxbal, behind in rural Buey Arriba. The three exiles settle in Connecticut, where Soledad takes up with a Dutch horticulturist who grows Cuban tobacco, but she, like her children, cannot escape the past. All three family members are defined by their longing for something lost. Ulises, especially, longs for something indefinable, something he wonders if he ever had in the first place, and which he carries as a burden anyway. A twisted promise Uxbal asks Isabel to keep drives the girl deep into Catholic mysticism. She seeks sacrifice, choosing first one martyrdom and then another, until she goes missing. Ulises is a natural with the Dutchman's soil, and he excels in Latin and the classics at school. He doesn't remember much about home, but when Soledad falls victim to cancer and asks him to find Isabel, Ulises returns to Cuba. In fact, all the characters end up where they began--in Cuba--their journeys as mythic as geographic. Perhaps strongest of all in this winning debut are the scenes set in Cuba: these humid and colorful pages sing with empathy. The orphans, rebels, and old women he describes breathe with vital intensity. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow
& Nesbit Associates. (Oct.)
Palacio, Derek. The Mortifications
Kristen Droesch
Xpress Reviews. (Sept. 9, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC
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[STAR]Palacio, Derek. The Mortifications. Tim Duggan: Crown. Oct. 2016. 320p. ISBN 9781101905692. $27; ebk. ISBN 9781101905708. F
[DEBUT] When Soledad Encarnacion flees Cuba with her twin son and daughter, Ulises and Isabel, she leaves behind her husband. Uxbal Encarnacion stubbornly refuses to abandon his homeland, fracturing the family. Mother and children eschew the Cuban community of Miami, FL, for chilly Hartford, CT, where they carve out a life for themselves. Soledad eventually enters into a relationship with Henri Willems, a Dutch tobacco farmer, while Isabel develops a spiritual life that involves closes ties with the dying and Ulises searches for something he can't define. Fate proves to be ultimately circular, with all roads leading back to Cuba and Uxbal. The intimate nature of the text combined with Palacio's style, earthy and yet delicately lyrical, makes reading this absolutely gorgeous debut novel an almost overwhelming experience. This saga of a torn family will inhabit readers, who will find it impossible to forget.
Verdict One of those especially rare novels that will resonate with readers on an achingly deep level.--Kristen Droesch, New York Univ. Libs.
Droesch, Kristen
A Powerful Story of Cuban
Exiles Has Classical
Overtones
By DINAW MENGESTU NOV. 1, 2016
THE MORTIFICATIONS
By Derek Palacio
310 pp. Tim Duggan Books. $27.
While reading Derek Palacio’s “The Mortifications,” I tried, briefly, to catalog all
the ways in which the story made direct, or even oblique, nods to sweeping,
multigenerational sagas. The novel is invested in its literary allusions, which haunt
the narrative almost as relentlessly as the past haunts the main characters, Soledad
and her twin children, Isabel and Ulises. Before the end of the first chapter, this
fractured family has fled their native Cuba, leaving behind a country, husband,
father and culture, and while their migration to America occurs as part of the Mariel
boatlift of 1980, it is also, Palacio suggests, an ancient story — a narrative of exile as
old as the Greek tragedies.
Palacio opens his novel in this classical mode: “Ulises Encarnación did not
believe in fate.” It’s hard not to feel a little nervous for the debut novel that sets off so
dramatically. In that opening line there is not only the nod to Homer, but also a
subtle declaration of the story’s intent to recast, or disrupt, the narratives of exile,
starting with antiquity. These are Cuban migrants who actively resist the narrative
norms established for them. Instead of the familiar shores of Miami, they arrive in
Hartford, Conn., at the start of winter. Rather than longing for the country they left
3/11/2017 A Powerful Story of Cuban Exiles Has Classical Overtones The New York Times
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behind, Soledad and her children, like good Americans, build private worlds that,
over the course of the narrative, stand in increasingly stark opposition to one
another.
Palacio unspools his characters’ lives with the type of omniscient authority
befitting an epic. He grants us immediate, intimate access to their private selves,
beginning most notably with Soledad’s burgeoning relationship with Henri Willems,
a tobacco farmer who, according to her, sees Cuba the same way she does. (“When
he talks about Cuba . . . it’s as if he is seeing the same island that I am,” she tells her
son.) Palacio moves just as swiftly and efficiently through Isabel’s deepening
commitment to her Catholic faith, as he does through Ulises’ devotion to growing
tobacco, and then later, to studying Aeschylus’ “Oresteia.” By doing so, he creates a
characteristically American portrait of domesticity — of lives built along parallel
lines of work and school that all too often fail to intersect. While Isabel prepares for
a life devoted to God, her twin brother follows in Willems’s footsteps, investing his
body and mind in the earth and the tobacco leaves that grow from it. And while on
the surface this may not sound like the stuff of dramatic tragedy, Palacio ensures
that it is. He understands the power of silence, and he breaks his characters’ hearts
wide open by leaving them just beyond one another’s reach.
The narrative may operate on a grand scale, but Palacio is just as gifted a
miniaturist, able to distill the unbearable ruptures in a family down to a single
image: “Soledad had lost, and she knew it. She slipped to her knees, and Ulises
watched as his mother begged forgiveness from his sister. Soledad cried, and Isabel
ran her fingers, her delicate and expressive fingers, through her mother’s hair. For
Ulises, it was the final tilt of all things gone askew, the mother kneeling before the
child, seeking redemption.”
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The world Palacio has built is perhaps best described by that “final tilt.” Palacio
does more than just make allusions to the Greek tragedies — he tilts them toward
Latin America, making it impossible not to hear Gabriel García Márquez’s
3/11/2017 A Powerful Story of Cuban Exiles Has Classical Overtones The New York Times
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description of José Arcadio Buendia as a man who “did not believe in the honesty of
Gypsies,” in that opening description of Ulises, who over the course of the novel,
grows into a towering beast of a man, while his twin sister Isabel commits to a vow
of silence. Likewise, Ulises’ obsessive reading of the “Oresteia” could easily be taken
as an overt declaration of the novel’s debt to Aeschylus’ trilogy of tragedies, making
Ulises a standin for Orestes, and Isabel, mute and emotionally bound to her father
and his faith, might be a kind of CubanAmerican Iphigenia.
This restlessness of Palacio’s approach — roaming across physical and cultural
borders, borrowing and revising as he sees fit — allows him to tread on territory
most American writers are reluctant to touch. He makes the most of Isabel’s
Catholicism, treating it as both a genuine article of faith, as well as an aperture into
Cuba’s complicated relationship to dogma, whether religious or revolutionary. He
eschews conventional realism, pushing his characters into almost mythic states.
Willems imagines the spirits of dead slaves rising from the burning tobacco leaves;
Ulises grows so large he is nicknamed “the Titan” by his peers, while Isabel and
Soledad discover how to speak to each other without language. And while Palacio
always renders such moments with the type of layered precision necessary to make
Willems’s ghosts palpable, the characters nonetheless occasionally feel strained,
their gestures and thoughts almost excessive, and Palacio runs dangerously close to
a type of symbolism that simply makes them extensions of a debate on faith and
literature.
Palacio’s characters, unlike those in most contemporary stories of migration, do
find their way home. They stagger back to Cuba one by one, and it’s here that the
novel makes the most of Palacio’s extraordinary ambition. Cuba, both before and
after the fall of the Soviet Union, was not only a place haunting the characters, but
also an animating force. It’s only fitting, then, that it is in Cuba that Ulises, Soledad,
Isabel, Willems and even Uxbal, the absent father who haunts them all, become
more than the sum of their individual parts. They are not saved or redeemed by loss,
by love, or by faith. They are, however, bound to something greater than themselves
through tragedy, and it’s in the depiction of that glorious tragedy, and all the love
and devotion that come with it, that Palacio’s novel becomes more than just epic. It
becomes extraordinary.
3/11/2017 A Powerful Story of Cuban Exiles Has Classical Overtones The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/books/review/mortificationsderekpalacio.html 4/4
Dinaw Mengestu is the author of “How to Read the Air” and “The Beautiful Things That
Heaven Bears.”
A version of this review appears in print on November 6, 2016, on Page BR15 of the Sunday Book
Review with the headline: The First Exile.
Cuba Is A Dream That Doesn't Let Go In 'The Mortifications'
October 6, 20167:00 AM ET
JASON SHEEHAN
The Mortifications
The Mortifications
by Derek Palacio
Hardcover, 310 pages purchase
There are books you read for the periods and books you read for the paragraphs — ones in which the action is discrete, punctuated and driving, moving you bodily and inexorably from line to line, and others that unfold at a lingering, more distracted pace. Some books are storms. Others are weather.
Derek Palacio's debut novel, The Mortifications, is very much the latter. It is hot sun and cool rain, morning fog and the hum of a fan in the window. It ranges and roams, this book. When it settles onto a moment, it does so with the weight of ten butterflies.
It is the story of the Encarnacións — mother Soledad and twins Ulises and Isabel — who left their native Cuba during the Mariel boat-lift in 1980, bypassed the growing Cuban exile communities in Miami and continued on traveling north until they hit Hartford, Conn., where they stopped, settled and built a life. For the first half of the book, their experiences are balanced by the almost ghostly memories of the family patriarch, political rebel Uxbal, who refused to leave Cuba with his wife and children. Who, as a matter of fought quite hard to keep them from leaving.
"[Uxbal] was so certain of his position that he'd tried holding his daughter ransom, locking Isabel inside the country house with him. Soledad was able to retrieve the girl only by holding Ulises hostage in return. Sewing shears in hand and pressed to her son's jugular, Soledad swore to Uxbal that unless Isabel walked out the front door, suitcase in hand, his bloodline would die."
And that's page one. A formative moment, absolutely. Dark, raw, cruel and practical, it sets down the relationship early, in stark terms, and then leaves it hanging like a cloud over the next hundred pages. Over every word, every action, every breath that Soledad, Ulises and Isabel take as they ease into their strange new world. Soledad becomes a court stenographer. She meets Henri Willems, a Dutch horticulturalist who grows tobacco in the hills — a history of cigars and death haunting him in ways that are both parallel to and opposite those memories of Uxbal that haunt the Encarnacións. Ulises excels in school, at Latin and in reading the classics. Isabel goes a different direction, into Catholic mysticism. Soledad grows distant (having asked so much of her children so young, she feels as though she cannot ask anything further of them).
It ranges and roams, this book. When it settles onto a moment, it does so with the weight of ten butterflies.
Jason Sheehan
And all of this is touched on so lightly, Palacio's gaze settling here and there across a span of years and observing the quiet details that make up the roots of life's narrative.
They are beautiful observations, too. Sometimes gentle, often gotten at sideways, through the lenses of experiences so native to the characters that not a word rings false. Like this, Ulises considering his relationship with Willems: "His logic was that he could scrape together a father, his old father, from bits of the Dutchman; he could resuscitate memories and eventually recall something of Uxbal besides the portrait lurking about his brain." Or this point-blank accounting of Isabel's youth: "By the time the twins finished high school, Ulises's sister had witnessed ninety-eight deaths."
About midway through, The Mortifications turns a corner. With the arrival of a letter from Uxbal — concrete proof of his reality, and the fact that he is still alive — the Encarnación family shatters. And suddenly, this ghost of a man who has lurked around the edges of a story absolutely full of ghosts becomes real. Not just a memory, but a man. An old man, a rebel still, living in a shack in the jungle, full of a power that comes solely from his long absence.
And the sections of the story set in Cuba are Palacio's best, because Cuba — more than Hartford, more than Ulises's school or Isabel's convent — is a mythic place. The moments here (strung closer together than anything else in the book, a nearly day-to-day accounting) have a magic lingering in them only previously felt in Willems's tobacco fields.
But at the same time, there's a loss. Of that early weightlessness, primarily. Of that sense of Palacio hovering, somehow, a half-inch above all the action, the perfect disconnected observer. Cuba seems to give him ankle weights, pulling him down closer to the ground and the physical experiences of his characters even as the land itself grows more magical. Palacio's Cuba is almost unreal — every hill, every flower, every young soldier and aging rebel existing like a dream which, eventually, draws home the entire Encarnación family and refuses to ever let them go.
Jason Sheehan is an ex-chef, a former restaurant critic and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. But when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.
The Mortifications: A Novel
By Derek Palacio Tim Duggan Books 320 pp.
Reviewed by Bárbara Mujica
December 9, 2016
The pull of family and Cuba loom large in this fascinating story reminiscent of Márquez.
Derek Palacio may well be one of the best narrators to come out of the Americas since Gabriel García Márquez. Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Mortifications is a family saga that combines the uncanny with astute and accurate depictions of reality — with the difference that Palacio’s story always remains anchored in the realm of the possible.
Palacio produces no characters like García Márquez’s Remedios, who suddenly floats up to heaven as she hangs out the laundry. Members of Palacio’s Encarnación clan grapple with everyday issues in recognizable ways, yet possess a kind of otherworldliness — an amalgamation of the ordinary and the extraordinary, reminiscent of the best Latin American magical realism.
Between April 15 and October 31, 1980, thousands of Cubans departed for the United States from Mariel Harbor, a mass exodus that came to be known as the Mariel Boatlift. Uxbal Encarnación, a deeply religious political insurgent, insists on staying in Cuba in order to overthrow Castro. His wife, Soledad, the novel’s indomitable protagonist, holds a knife to their son, Ulises’, throat in order to force Uxbal to allow their daughter, Isabel, to emigrate with her and the boy — the first of many examples of Soledad’s toughness.
Instead of settling in the thriving Cuban community in Miami, Soledad heads north, to Hartford, Connecticut, where she gets a job as a court stenographer. Her children thrive at St. Brendan’s Catholic school, Ulises displaying an extraordinary aptitude for the classics and Isabel, steeped in her father’s religiosity, embracing the spiritual life.
While Ulises struggles with the frigid New England winters, Isabel adores the cold. One day while she is out skating, a child falls through the ice, and Isabel comforts him during his last moments. Feeling that she is called to serve the terminally ill, Isabel volunteers at the local hospital, but her presence at the bedside of the dying leads the townspeople to suspect her of murder. Finally, she joins a convent, takes a vow of silence, and trains to work with the hearing-impaired.
In the meantime, Soledad meets Henri Willems, a Dutch tobacco farmer, with whom she begins a lifelong affair. Although the steady, practical Willems seems completely distinct from the devout, idealistic Uxbal, he also has an otherworldly dimension. Willem’s grandfather had been a tobacco farmer in the West Indies, where he kept indentured servants to work the fields.
When cholera broke out among the workers, the Dutchman refused to take measures to protect them, and many died. Finally, the health inspector shut down the farms and burned the crops and the corpses. Willems’ father, Adlar, started his own tobacco company but made only cigarettes. “He said cigars were tainted,” explains Willems. “He said he had dreams, and in his dreams when he smoked cigars, the souls of the dead would seep out of them and haunt him.” The fear of ghosts haunts Willems, but he cannot share the magnitude of his terror with Soledad.
In spite of these problems, the family seems stable. Isabel visits periodically, communicating with Soledad only through writing. Ulises starts college and seems a normal young man. Willems and Ulises develop a close relationship, the younger man learning about tobacco farming and soon becoming an expert in different kinds of seeds.
Then, one day, a letter comes from Uxbal.
Until this moment, Cuba has been like a distant dream for Soledad. The letter constitutes an intrusion and a reminder of another reality: Soledad is still married, and her husband is alive back home. For a long while, the letter sits, untouched, on the kitchen table. Perhaps Willems’ curse has borne fruit or the God to whom Soledad has recently returned is punishing them, for Isabel abandons her mother to go work with hearing-impaired children in Central America, and Soledad is diagnosed with breast cancer.
The letter is the catalyst that draws them all back to the island. Isabel is the first to find her father, old and decrepit, living in the hills among desperate, failed counterrevolutionaries. Convinced that it is up to her to secure the next generation of Encarnacións, she makes a surprising decision to meet this responsibility. Ulises also finds his way back to the camp, and finally, even Soledad and Willems return.
The names in the narrative are key. Encarnación (Incarnation) suggests rebirth in both a religious and a material sense. Soledad (Solitude) encompasses the loneliness that menaces all the characters. Uxbal, a Mayan word meaning three, could refer both to the Trinity and Uxbal’s wife and children. Ulises connotes the traveler, and Isabel, like Saint Elizabeth, evokes sterility made fertile. Finally, Willems, from Old German, means “determined protector,” which captures perfectly the essence of Soledad’s lover. The breadth of themes and the use of names steeped in symbolism give The Mortifications a mythical aura as well as a sense of universality.
The “mortifications” of the title are the indignities that plague human existence — war, abandonment, isolation, fear. Yet Palacio also portrays the resilience that enables us to bear them. The battles between body and spirit, voice and silence, solitude and love that rage throughout the novel exhaust the characters, but never obliterate their determination to survive, to protect one another, and ultimately to return home.
Bárbara Mujica is a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Her latest novel, I Am Venus (Overlook Press), explores the identity of the model for Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. Her previous fiction includes the international bestseller Frida, based on the relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and Sister Teresa, based on the life of Teresa of Avila. Mujica has won several prizes for her short fiction, including the E.L. Doctorow International Fiction Competition, the Pangolin Prize, and the Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award for short fiction. Three of her stories and two of her novels have been winners in the Maryland Writers’ Association national competition.
Book review: 'The Mortifications' offers poignant portrait of complex family
By ASHLEY RIGGLESON FOR THE FREE LANCE–STAR Nov 26, 2016 (0)
Mortifications
Mortifications
Derek Palacio pens an untraditional immigrant narrative in his début novel, “The Mortifications.” On the surface, the Encarnación family, who came to the United States from Cuba during the famed Mariel Boatlift, has everything it needs to adjust to life in Hartford, Conn.
Soledad, the family’s strong-willed and passionate matriarch, finds work as a court stenographer. Meanwhile, her two children, Ulises and Isabel, are high academic achievers.
As time passes, however, it becomes apparent that this fractured family (living without a patriarch since father Uxbal stayed behind in Cuba to fight communism) cannot let go of its roots. Instead, each member of the family finds ways to hold onto the past.
Soledad meets and begins a relationship with Willems, a well-intentioned tobacco farmer who is constantly living in Uxbal’s shadow.
Ulises turns away from academia to work alongside migrant workers in Willems’ tobacco fields, and Isabel becomes an archetype of piety.
Despite these methods of coping with their exile, Uxbal, and the nation he stayed behind to preserve, continue to be persistent forces in the family’s tenuous dynamic.
Palacio’s richly textured and atmospheric novel creates an almost mythic territory in which to explore some of life’s most defining questions. What is love? What is faith? How do you keep a family together when it has been uprooted from its homeland? As expected, what answers the novel has to offer are complex, bittersweet and often poignant.
In addition, Palacio’s prose is clear and interspersed with wisdom. He proves himself an adept chronicler of life’s many facets and produces a novel about the power of history to shape people’s lives. The end result is a portrait of a family that is both achingly human and beautifully humane.
Ashley Riggleson
is a freelance reviewer in Rappahannock County.
More Information
THE MORTIFICATIONS
By Derek Palacio
(Tim Duggan Books, $27, 310 pp.)
Publication: Oct. 4
Cuba is Both Near and Far in Derek Palacio’s ‘The Mortifications’
Posted on October 7, 2016 by Aram Mrjoian
9781101905692_6f6b4The catalyst for Derek Palacio’s debut novel, The Mortifications, is granted on page one: despite being impoverished, family patriarch and flagging political insurgent Uxbal Encarnación refuses to leave Cuba. Meanwhile, his wife Soledad, along with his children Ulises and Isabel, join thousands of other Cubans in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, pushing beyond Miami northward to Hartford, Connecticut.
Immediately, we are introduced to a standoff between conflicting parents and a family divided. As time goes on, the geographical, political, and spiritual divisions of the Encarnación family set the tone for this work of literary fiction, which delves more (at least more directly) into disparate family dynamics, mythmaking, and—both amorous and familial—love, rather than specific national and geopolitical ideologies.
Though Uxbal is left behind by his family, he is still an omnipresent entity among his loved ones, causing Soledad and the children to continue their relationships with him in various portentous ways. Perhaps, affected most profoundly is Isabel, who swears to Uxbal that she will remain chaste until he can select a fellow insurgent for her to marry; this arrangement being necessary so that Isabel may better procreate rebel offspring to continue the movement across generations. Now geographically adrift from her father, she opts to become a nun in order to uphold her promise. Meanwhile, Ulises appears to grow physically larger by the day and finds his calling not in religion but instead among Connecticut’s anatopistic tobacco fields, taking on the profession of his mother’s new lover, Willems. Soledad never formally divorces her Cuban husband, but is also sexually awakened once she has left him, as if trying to rectify her decision to leave Cuba via carnal distraction.
Rather than assuage over time, tension and confusion only intensify in the duration of Uxbal’s absence. Each family member can’t shake feeling bound to Cuba and their distant patriarch. Even Willems becomes somehow transfixed by the legend of Uxbal’s living phantom.
The frayed family connections are vaguely reminiscent of Cesar Aira’s The Hare, insofar as that certain aspects of family history must be tied up for clarity and that dyads of children are integrally symbolic. In Palacio’s case, the need to explain the Encarnacion family history is less demanding than Aira’s, thereby leaving readers more room to consider existential dualities. More plainly, there’s ample opportunity to consider the emotional and spiritual shades of gray.
What becomes clear early on in the novel is Palacio’s gift for pacing. The prose is patient and robust, without overindulging in longwinded, complicated constructions. The precision pays off, particularly in establishing complex characters that can’t be pigeonholed, despite having archetypical qualities. Palacio also distances readers far enough away to utilize Uxbal allegorically, but does so without nullifying familial sentiment. Uxbal’s humanity is transcended and ratified simultaneously. If there is a critique to be had here, it’s that Palacio falls back on phrases such as “back then” or “then this happened” a little too often, bringing attention to the narrator and removing readers momentarily from the story at hand.
On another level, The Mortifications is a powerful vehicle for Palacio to examine his family history as a young Cuban-American. The plot considers what it means to be attached and removed from one’s homeland from multiple perspectives. There is a sense of both Cuba the forgotten, idyllic Utopia, ripe with gardens of juicy tomatoes, as well as Cuba the mysterious foreign land left behind and stripped from memory. After all, at its core, The Mortifications is a story about the immigrant experience. The novel is mythic and captures a pivotal moment in Cuban culture, but since it is honed on one family, it also intrinsically serves as a single incarnation of a specific diaspora.
Of course, the family’s distinct surname is not without mention. The individuals in the Encarnación family do indeed seem to go through many spiritual life cycles, each of which is grounded in compelling prose and elevated in ample cigar smoke, a duality which makes Palacio’s debut a truly enjoyable read.
Fiction – Literary
The Mortifications by Derek Palacio
Tim Duggan Books
Published October 1, 2016
ISBN 9781101905708
BOOK REVIEWS · 02/17/2014
How to Shake the Other Man by Derek Palacio
Reviewed by Brian Seemann
The title of Derek Palacio’s novella suggests a desire to rid oneself of a potential foe, and considering how much the novella concerns itself with boxing and the bond between an untested fighter and his trainer, How to Shake the Other Man seems an apt title for Palacio’s debut. However, the story of a young Dominican coming to terms with the death of his lover as he prepares for his first fight reveals implications far beyond boxing, primarily that of how a young man must come to terms with who he is and who he wants to be. While Javi, Palacio’s captivating protagonist, must ultimately elude the punches of another boxer inside the ring, before that, he must shake away the person he has been while also becoming the man those closest to him believe he is capable of being.
In the first pages of How to Shake the Other Man, readers learn of the murder of Javi’s lover, Marcel, and discover that Marcel’s brother, Oscar, has taken Javi under his tutelage at his gym. Despite his love for boxing and the promise he made to his brother, Oscar doesn’t want Javi to fight; the boy is restless and burns up his energy too quickly, and Oscar’s afraid that Javi won’t be able to manage for long inside the ring. Unbeknownst to Oscar, Javi doesn’t really want to fight either. Instead, readers find that “Javi doesn’t want to dance anymore. He wants to run.” Now that Marcel’s been murdered, Javi wants to escape New York City and the world he’s become a part of since his family immigrated, but like Oscar, he’s conflicted by the promises he’s made in the past to Marcel.
Marcel’s relationship to both Oscar and Javi comes through backstory, and each scene is captured wonderfully by Palacio. Marcel is honey-voiced and loquacious, a Cuban businessman and owner of thirty-two New York City street coffee vendors. Upon meeting Javi, Marcel ushers Javi into a life in which he appears more comfortable; rather than suffer the condemnation of his father for being homosexual, Javi embraces the opportunities Marcel can provide him. In perhaps one of Palacio’s most impressive lines, he writes that, “Javi knew Marcel was teaching him how to stay, tethering him to a stubborn heart.” For a young, energetic man disinclined to live a sheltered life with his father, Javi sees Marcel as a foundation, and perhaps this is why, after Marcel’s murder, Javi forces himself to continue training. It’s easy to run from one’s problems, but there’s far more respect and dignity in shaking away the past in order to find a better future.
Javi appears to arrive at this conclusion as the novella comes to a close, and after an encounter with a man propositioning him for sex that briefly unsettles him, Javi emerges for his fight after all, somewhat to Oscar’s surprise. Palacio’s ending provides the sort of resolution any strong literary piece demands; it offers an external culmination of events while also continuing to plunge into the internal conflicts of character, and as Javi moves inside the ring, another boxer in front of him, Palacio writes: “Oscar’s told him to run, but now Javi thinks otherwise.” The fighter maintains his position, as strong outside as he is inside.
Brian Seemann’s latest fiction appears in REAL, Forge, The Mix Tape: A Flash Fiction Anthology (Fast Forward Press), and Home of the Brave: Somewhere in the Sand Anthology (Press 53)
A Small, but Strong Cup of Coffee: How to Shake the Other Man, by Derek Palacio
How to Shake the Other Man, by Derek Palacio. Nouvella Books. 63 pages. $11.00, paper.
Derek Palacio’s debut book, Nouvella Book’s most recent, is top notch and reaffirms everything I’ve already thought about the in-between novella form. How to Shake the Other Man is a beautiful meditation on love, brotherhood, identity, and boxing. Palacio, who has a story forthcoming in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013 collection, has staked a claim for himself, emerging as one of the freshest young voices to come out of the fiction landscape in years.
There’s plenty to gleam from this book despite its size. The shifting tenses, the emotion that is bubbling just beneath the surface, sort of rippling on the edge of the precipice, the simplistic beauty of several complex relationships, the identity issues (be it cultural or sexual), this book has everything one could hope for.
Palacio’s deft ability to shift back and forth within the constructs of a multi-layered tale belies his youth. He shifted back and forth between the past and the present like a prizefighter tiptoeing around his opponent in the ring, waiting for the right moment to change course and catch them off guard. Just as I was getting a hold of the present storyline Palacio would throw an unexpected left hook and drop in a scene of backstory, adding a tier of complexity to the already finely woven narrative.
The book begins and ends with scenes from inside the boxing ring. Although the text is anchored by the lonely and unrelenting world of boxing, it’s the relationships between the characters, a portrait of brothers, an insight into two lovers, and the death of one of the brother’s that forces the lover and remaining brother to re-examine their own relationship that serves as this book’s motor. As these relationships unfurl and the particulars are untangled things get messy but the underlying beauty of the humanity that Palacio exposes within these relationships pushes the book forward at a pace similar to that of a classic heavyweight match. Each page, each section gaining momentum, feeding off the last forcing the reader to sit up a bit more, to pay attention so as not to miss a key sentence or phrase feels like I was sitting front row for a Tyson bout in his heyday. Blink and you’ll miss the magic. Get up to go to the bathroom and you’ll miss his opponent bouncing off the canvas, mouthpiece flung out into the stands.
In many ways the boxing metaphors are bigger than the book itself. Just like many took Tyson’s dominance for granted, didn’t appreciate the degree of difficulty, the multiple aspects that he balanced and honed to a razor sharp edge, it’s easy to fall in with Palacio’s narrative and completely forget, or dismiss, his level of skill. Even if this short book is a sprint rather than a marathon it doesn’t take away from its grace, the skill needed to execute it. Palacio has honed his craft here and by the end you’re left much like an inexperienced boxer after a match: tired, dazed, confused, and not quite sure what just happened to you but knowing fully that you can’t wait to get back in the ring and do it again.
The story felt as though it could’ve been strung out into a full-length book but that’s the beauty, and challenge, of a novella I suppose. To be able to compact feelings and scenes and a narrative arc enough to keep it at sixty odd pages but to be able to include enough extra brush strokes so as to illuminate the story with the proper amount of nuance. This balancing act, this situation which is usually only discussed if the author fails at it, is what makes this book so good. Besides being a gripping story with memorable and unique characters, Palacio has taken the nuts and bolts of storytelling and massaged them so as to help further the story along rather than impede it.
Like an underdog, long shot no name boxer, this story refuses to silenced, waiting for the right moment to strike and show that even the smallest of books can pack quite a punch. Palacio’s sense of language, his ability to use the right phrase at the right moment and the equally difficult job of knowing when to back off, when to let the silence envelop the reader is a rare find nowadays, especially in a debut book.
How to Shake the Other Man is a beautiful elegy to family and brotherhood and love. Palacio’s exploration of the dichotomy between immigrant minorities trying to find, and place themselves within a cold and foreign environment and the machismo of the world of boxing and the relationship between brothers is what gives this book friction. Sparks virtually fly off the page, igniting his prose in a multitude of meanings depending on reader.
I finished this book in one sitting. Read it straight through. It’s on my shelf now but I suspect that it won’t stay there for long. It’s only been a week and already I’m itching for another look, another peak to see if I missed some hidden gem. That to me, is what a good book is. That want, that need to re-read it. The only thing better than reading a good book is reading one from a new author. Take my advice and keep Derek Palacio’s name stored in your head for the future. Chances are you’ll be hearing more from him, a lot more.
Patrick Trotti is a writer, editor, and student. On good days it’s in that order. For more go to patricktrotti.com.