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The descent into destiny

By PHILIP HERTER
Published January 29, 2006

Paradise Travel

By Jorge Franco. Translated by Katherine Silver

Farrar Strauss Giroux., $23, 228 pp

Reviewed by Philip Herter

Colombian novelist Jorge Franco's heart-tugging tale of immigration gone wrong combines the conventions of the fish-out-of-water story with the melodrama of doomed teenage love. Within these thematic borders, Paradise Travel shows that while every immigrant's story is unique, the American dream has its limitations.

Love-struck Marlon will do anything to please his willful girlfriend Reina, a local beauty who knows what she wants - a one-way ticket out of the confines of their native Medellin, and a chance at the good life in America - and is willing to do anything to get it. Never mind that they can't get visas.

Franco skillfully captures the immigrants' sense of desperation at home in Colombia, where economic opportunity and self determination, not to mention a little privacy, seem far out of reach. And he is wise enough to know that changing countries is not always motivated by simple economics or the siren call of the loud and proud American dream machine. For anyone brave or foolish enough to swap cultures and traditions, character is destiny.

After paying all their money to a coyote, the young couple find themselves in a New York City safe house so small it makes their panic sound like shouting. Surrounded by the wide open possibilities of America, the lovers' agendas quickly diverge. Reina and Marlon find themselves unprepared for life in a place where "People who say "I can't' go straight to hell." With no money, no contacts and barely a word of English between them, things fall apart. Reina vanishes into the chilly metropolis, and Marlon, heartbroken, descends into the hurly burly of homelessness.

Franco is touted as a member of the McOndo school of writers who, in reaction to the long shadow of magical realism cast by Garcia Marquez' fictional Macondo, prize tough realism over fantastic visions. Franco is in his element describing "the magnificent and challenging, welcoming and disproportionate" city of New York, and Katherine Silver's neat translation captures the author's straightforward narrative style.

Paradise Travel, a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of immigration, also relates a story of young love that would be tragic in any country. Illuminating the often-overlooked emotional consequences of migration, where legal realities like visas and green cards clash with the facts of the human heart, Paradise Travel is, finally, a story about the dangerous journey of love.

- Philip Herter reviews literature in translation from New York.

[Last modified January 28, 2006, 09:30:05]