Just published: THE LADY MATADOR'S HOTEL
"The novel has the energy of an obsessive tango. Or, indeed, a bullfight."
--The New York Times Book Review
Buy from: Amazon | Indie Bound
Booklist Review:
The Hotel Miraflor is the epicenter for explosive conflict in the capital of an unnamed Central American country ravaged by civil war and corruption. During the first week in November 2003, a presidential campaign reaches fever pitch, a military conference convenes at the hotel, and battles intimate and political, ritualized and spontaneous, erupt with seismic force. The hotel's most prominent guest is a veritable goddess, Suki Palacios, a lithe and fearless matador from California of Mexican and Japanese descent, a woman who brandishes her beauty like a weapon. Another indomitable woman, attorney Gertrudis, uses the hotel as headquarters for her lucrative black-market adoption operation. Won Kim, a reluctant Korean factory owner, has sequestered his pregnant teenage mistress in the honeymoon suite. Aura, an ex-guerrilla working as a waitress at the hotel, plots revenge against a murderous, weight-lifting colonel. Garcia strides and twirls with a matador's daring, grace, and focus as she enters the psyches of diverse, intense, and unnerving characters; choreographs converging and dramatic story lines; and confronts the pervasiveness of the inexplicable. Streamlined, sexy, darkly witty, and succinctly tragic, Garcia's fifth sharply imagined novel of caustic social critique concentrates the horrors of oppression and violence into a compulsively readable tale of coiled fury and penetrating insight. --Donna Seaman
First Review!
"Sensual prose softens the crushing blows that life doles out to almost every character in this latest from García (Dreaming in Cuban), in which six lives cross paths in a luxury hotel somewhere in the tropics of Central America. It's a gloomy portrait of modern life, told through a series of vivid, sometimes fantastical, narrative moments. In the honeymoon suite, a Korean businessman contemplates suicide as his pregnant 15-year old mistress flits around dressed up like a harlot from a bygone era. On the rooftop, waitress and ex-guerrilla Aura Estrada sips tea with her dead brother, who warns her of the arrival of the colonel who killed him. Martín Abel, the corpulent colonel, plots against leftists, curses the wife who's left him, and lusts after the most talked about guest in the hotel: Suki Palacios, also known as the Lady Matador. A Californian of Mexican and Japanese descent, Suki is in town to fight in the first ever Battle of the Lady Matadors in the Americas. The sultry atmosphere, dash of the supernatural, and well-developed characters are a winning mix, and the story's many parts move with frictionless ease. (Sept.)--Publishers Weekly
"With beauty, elegance, and finesse, Cristina García weaves together a complex tale in writing as stunning as the flourish of a matador's cape. A brave work told brilliantly. I toss you carnations, Cristina. ¡Brava!" --Sandra Cisneros
"In this novel of many hearts and voices, Cristina García enchants us with the lyricism and humor and political engagement that we've come to expect from her work. Thank goodness the Lady Matador has opened her extraordinarily fascinating hotel to all of us via Cristina's keen eye and gorgeous prose." --Edwidge Danticat
A dazzling, evocative novel about the intertwining lives of the denizens of a Latin American hotel in the midst of political turmoil . . . a fierce and gorgeous story about politics, gender, and passion.
In an unnamed Central American capital, at a luxurious hotel, the lives of six men and women converge over the course of one week. There is a Japanese-Mexican-American matadora in town for a bull-fighting competition; an ex-guerilla now working as a waitress in the hotel coffee shop; a Korean manufacturer with an underage mistress ensconced in the honeymoon suite; an international adoption lawyer of German descent; a colonel who committed atrocities during his country's long civil war; and a Cuban poet who has come with his American wife to adopt a local infant. With each day, their lives become further entangled resulting in the unexpected-- the clash of histories and the pull of revenge and desire.
Cristina García's magnificent orchestration of politics, the intimacies of daily life, and the frailty of human nature unfolds in a powerful, ambitious, often comic, and unforgettable tale.
excerpt:
"But I have in me all the dreams of the world."
-Fernando Pessoa
ROOM 719
The lady matador stands naked before the armoire mirror and unrolls her long, pink stockings. She likes to put these on first, before the fitted pants and the stark white shirt, before the bullioned waistcoat and the ribs-length jacket densely embroidered with sequins and beads, before the braces, and the soft black slippers, and the wisp of silk at her throat; before the montera, an authentic one she ordered from a bullfighters' shop in Madrid, which sits atop her hair, pulled back in a single braid; before her cape, voluminous as a colony of bats.
Suki Palacios has come a long way to this spired hotel in the tropics, to this wedge of forgotten land between continents, to this place of hurricanes and violence and calculated erasures. She arrived yesterday from Los Angeles, trading the moody squalor of one city for another, the broken Spanish for one more lyrical. In a week she will compete in the first Battle of the Lady Matadors in the Americas. Suki is here early to display her skills and generate enthusiasm for the fight. By the time the other matadoras arrive in the capital, its citizens will be clamoring for blood.
Every window looks inward to a crosshatch of courtyards and fountains, banyans and Madeira palms. The hotel pool is visible beneath Suki's window, a glazed and artificial blue. A cascade of bougainvillea brightens the patio. Aviaries with raucous jungle parrots outmatch the mariachis in volume and plumage. The lady matador is tempted to submit to the hotel's shielding niceties, to ignore the afternoon torpor awaiting her in the ring. She's grown accustomed to the jeering spectators who come to spit at her and provoke the bulls. They would gladly banish her from the sport altogether--interloper, scandalous woman playing at being a man.
Suki will ignore them. She'll keep a watchful eye on each bull, on the thick hump of its beckoning neck muscle which, if pierced properly, will lead her straight to its heart. Before the final thrust of her sword will come preludes of ritual and fear: the whip of her red muleta; the stink of the bristling bull as it passes; her pivoting hips as she winds the beast around her in dizzying succession; the reverse slide across the dusty ring, her speciality, fluttering the folds of her cape like butterfly wings. As she awaits the bull's last charge, sword in hand, in the suerte de recibir, her mouth will flood with a mineral saltiness, as if some essential earthly cycle has been fulfilled.
The lady matador devours the sliced pear she ordered, at great expense, from room service. The pear is unsatisfactory, hard and mealy, but she finishes it, seeds and all. Later there'll be time for more agreeable, local fruit. Last night Suki visited the cathedral, offm the colonial plaza. It was All Souls Day and the whisperings to the dead rose from the pews, circling in the naves until they hummed with a humid sorrow. Suki trusts in the enigmas of the unknown as she does her own eyesight, or the pumping muscles of her heart. The trick is balancing the measurable known against the vast chaos that defines everything else. In medical school, Suki's professors praised her for her lack of sentimentality but they underestimated her respect for the imperceptible.
In the cathedral, Suki slipped a fifty dollar bill into the offerings box and carefully lit fourteen candles, one for every year she and her mother were both alive. Ritual is everything. Her father, a professional dancer, taught her this. Fourteen candles for her dead mother. Pink stockings first. One sliced ripe pear. For extra luck, silent sex with a stranger two days before a fight. (On Friday, she'd found a suitable partner at an Hermosa Beach discotheque.) Then in the shadowed moment before she steps into the ring, Suki repeats three words in Spanish and Japanese: arrogance, honor, death.
The lady matador checks her profile in the dresser mirror, the profile her father insists is her grandfather's, a redheaded Mexican bullfighter famous in the thirties. Ramón Palacios lasted one season in Spain--billed as El Azteca, he fought in the same rings as the legendary Manolete and Joselito--before a severe goring forced him back to Veracruz with a lame left leg. Suki's father grew up listening to Abuelo Ramón's stories along with the instantaneous revisions by his wife, an upper class sevillana he'd seduced at the height of his success. Abuelo Ramón was fond of saying that only matadors, like angels, can tame death and become immortal.
Suki fastens her cape, adjusts her killing sword, and, with a final look around her, sweeps out of the room. She passes a cluster of military men in the hallway, formal in their decorated khaki uniforms. From their uptight demeanor, Suki guesses they're from Chile. The officers are too dazzled by her to speak; fearful, perhaps, that the lady matador might turn out to be a disturbingly beautiful man.
The elevator doors open to reveal a row of Latin American generals. Suki fights the urge to inspect their medals, pluck a few shiny ones for herself. Instead she nods briskly and joins them. Conversation stops as the men pause to inhale the lady matador's alluring scent of pears and French perfume.
"You will fight the bulls today?" The voice comes from the back of the descending elevator in confident, accented English. It belongs to a droopy-eyed colonel, broad across the chest.
"Sí," Suki answers languidly as the elevator doors open. Then she strides across the bustling lobby of the hotel, where a bellboy whistles for the limousine that will take her to the ring.
* * *