“Nice one … but where is the magical realism?” commented a friend, after reading one of my stories. A joke, yes, but there was also an element of blunt sincerity to his words — it isn’t rare for me to bump face-first into the expectation that I deploy the magical realist algorithm in my writing. Why should I do that, you may ask. Well, because I am Latin American and that’s what we do, concoct magical realist things. Look around: It is everywhere, the de facto association between the region’s literary production and these two vague words. If the Holy Bible had been penned in my neck of the woods the whole of Christianity would have been condemned to the status of yet another writerly cult, like the Church of Tolkien, or the Brethren of Literary Fiction.
For in the past decade, another front has opened up in the fight: restaurants and home kitchens, where we are slowly learning to defeat the enemy bite by bite. In Florida, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in partnership with REEF has enlisted chefs to make a case for lionfish as a delicacy: pan-seared, skewered on its own spines (provided that the spines have been baked first, to denature the venom) or diced into ceviche. To the south, in Colombia, where the government has declared the lionfish a “national security threat,” an ad agency persuaded local priests to exhort their congregations to eat lionfish during Lent, as a good deed, to help restore equilibrium to the sea.
Sometimes I forget my own age too. When people ask the ages of my boys, I round up to give myself time to get used to where they are going. But although my father doesn’t have very much time left, and I have some, my boys still have all the time in the world. The younger one does a little dance on the edge of the jetty. The older one tilts back his head, spreads his arms, and shouts something toward the sky.
I watch my boys and talk, and my father listens. Life, I say, or am trying to say, which is always happening on so many levels, all at the same time.
With wit and warmth, Hornby reflects on what makes a person belong to a country, a generation, a social group; and above all, what makes a person belong to another person. When difference carries more weight than similarity, when, as Joseph thinks, "There isn't a single way in which we're 'us'", Just Like You asks softly, hopefully: "Could you only love someone who thought the same way as you, or were there other bridges to be built further up the river?"
While calamitous, the storms are, sadly, routine. “Hurricanes have been churning up ocean waters and slamming into land for all of recorded history,” historian Eric Jay Dolin writes in “A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes.”
In the citizenry of the dead
the soul still holds the shape of the body