Book: Neruda On The Park: A Novel

Author: Cleyvis Natera,

Publisher: Ballantine

Price: $28

The idea of ‘home’ is always in flux — “A fluid thing, for sure, but precious,” according to Luz Guerrero, the daughter of the Guerrero family, in Cleyvis Natera’s Neruda on the Park. This flux lies at the core of the novel.

To Eusebia Guerrero, Luz’s mother, and countless other immigrants from the Dominican Republic who have made Nothar Park in New York their home, the fight to save their neighbourhood is, equally, a fight to save their identity, their very existence. For Eusebia, the stakes merit transcending rationality. Yet Luz, the Harvard-educated lawyer, experiences hostility in the same space — the feeling is that of being an outsider — and longs for freedom. A spectre of displacement hangs in the air throughout the novel.

Language plays a key role in the book, especially when it comes to the relationship between mother and daughter. Eusebia is a woman who feels a bodily revulsion at using English. Luz, on the other hand, is seen as someone who has lost her mother tongue, barely able to speak Spanish. But towards the end, she starts regaining it, bit by bit. Her reading of Pablo Neruda out loud, haltingly, for her parents and herself, is like a conscious but slow return to her roots.

For the Tongues, the triplets who are guardian figures to the neighbourhood, language posits another layer of discrimination. They talk about how most Black Americans did not notice the in-migration of people from the Dominican Republic at first. “But a different language cleaved us,” they say, “They closed their ears to us, grew suspicious, watchful.” Not only did the Dominicans’ skin colour severe them from the Whites, but their language also separated them from the Blacks. This duality of language, a tool that can both hold people together and cause cracks to appear, is beautifully explored by Natera. Her sensitive handling of hate crime and experiences of immigration, anger, insecurity, and delirium is also poignant.

Natera is a master of imagery. From the red dirt of the home town of Eusebia and Vladimir in the Dominican Republic to the rust on the metal bars of the fire escape at their home in Nothar Park, her descriptions breathe life into mundane, everyday things. But the most recurring image is that of the orca that swims around with her dead baby on her back. It turns into a symbol of Eusebia’s struggles and, ultimately, of the grief that she bears

Yet, Neruda on the Park is not without hope. The book does not have a decisive, climactic ending, thereby leaving room for continuation, rebuilding and rejuvenation.