In Cuba I was a German Shepherd
by Ana Menéndez
Grove Press

Ana Menéndez's stories evoke both a sense of home and homelessness. Without exception, the characters of "In Cuba I was a German Shepherd" are all Cuban exiles living in Miami, and the island looms large in the stories' settings and the mentalities of the characters — but the stories and the characters are also solidly American. Menendez knows this territory intimately; the daughter of Cuban exiles, she grew up in Los Angeles and worked as a journalist in Miami for several years.

She doesn't give away much about her personal experience, but varying degrees of displacement color her characters' lives. In some, uncomfortably supplanted characters grate against their new country and each other.

Hortencia and Felipe never had children, and after the revolution they settled in Miami along with everyone else she knew. By then, the love-glow of revenge had faded and Felipe's malnourished frame and rough manners only incensed Hortencia. Her parents' money evaporated along with the rest of their world and Hortencia and Felipe were forced into a small home in Sweetwater. There they lived in much-reduced circumstances that every day reminded Hortencia of the crooked turns her life had taken.

In others, the characters find solace in their communities and their American surroundings take on a familiar air.

When Raúl showed up in Miami one summer looking for work, Máximo added one more waiter's spot for his old acquaintance from L Street. Each night, after the customers had gone, Máximo and Rosa and Raúl and Havana's old lawyers and bankers and dreamers would sit around the biggest table and eat and talk and sometimes, late in the night after several glasses of wine, someone would start the stories that began with "In Cuba I remember."

The characters like Raúl and Máximo, who play chess in the park in the title story, acknowledge their displacement with quiet sadness and suppressed anger. Others, like the child narrator in "Miami Relatives," are profoundly confused and unsettled. The child is baffled by the "old uncle in Havana" whose picture is kept in the closet; Menéndez writes, "The photo is covered with scuff marks and tiny cuts like scratches over his face... It's hard to invite friends over when you don't know if your mother will suddenly walk out of the closet, her fingernails red with blood."

Although some of the wilder passages are effective, when Menéndez moves toward the fantastic, as in the example above, her grasp on the narrative slips and it's easy to get lost in the characters' own confusion. Ultimately, she handles gentle melancholy better than other-worldly imaginings like "Miami Relatives" and "Why We Left." "The Perfect Fruit," "The Story of a Parrot" and the title story are the strongest of the collection, and, not coincidentally, the ones in which she sticks most closely to reality.

In all the stories, though, her language is strong, consistent and beautifully evocative. She paints emotive descriptions in broad strokes.

Not until the last story, "Her Mother's House," does a single character return to Cuba. Lisette is a journalist, lonely and estranged from her husband, who's searching for her mother's old house and looking for that elusive sense of place and history all Menéndez' characters seem to seek. Lisette's trip is the first time Menéndez gives her readers even a tiny glimpse of Cuba, which hovers behind every word she writes.

It was a simple reporting trip, a stroke of luck. She wasn't going to explain to her mother things she could barely explain to herself. How every story needed a beginning. How her past had come to seem like a blank page, waiting for the truth to darken it.

Like Menéndez' book as a whole, the truth Lisette finds is gratifying and sobering at the same time, a collision of past and present that tastes intensely bittersweet. Deep-seated cultural displacement isn't something that's portrayed easily or often, but Menéndez projects just enough that readers feel the impact of exile without feeling alienated from the characters.

— Gwen Glazer (grglazer at netscape dot net)