Paradise Travel
A Novel
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5.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From one of Colombia's leading novelists, a tragicomic story of unrequited love and a view of New York through the wide eyes of an illegal immigrant
Paradise Travel recounts the adventures of Marlon Cruz, a naïve young man from Medellín, Colombia, who agrees to accompany the beautiful, ambitious woman he loves to New York. On their first night in Queens, Marlon and Reina lose each other, thus initiating Marlon's descent into the underbelly of our country.
A leader of the gritty-realist movement known as McOndo, Jorge Franco evokes the follies and pains of unrequited love at the same time that he explores deeper inequalities between North and South America. Moving between lower-middle-class Colombia and immigrant New York (specifically, the Jackson Heights neighborhood seen recently in the movie Maria Full of Grace), Paradise Travel is an exciting work from a rising star, celebrated by Gabriel García Márquez as "one of those to whom I should like to pass the torch" of Colombian fiction.
Praise for Rosario Tijeras:
"Latin America's McOndo literary movement drags the butterflies of magical realism into Burger King. With Jorge Franco's narco-saga Rosario Tijeras, it may have found its first masterpiece." —Rachel Aviv, Salon
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of the self-anointed South American "McOndo" school of writers instead of being children of Marx and Coca-Cola, they claim McDonald's, Macintoshes and condos Franco saw his novel Rosario Tijeras sell over 100,000 copies in his native Colombia (it was published in the U.S. by Seven Stories last year). This fourth novel is Franco's second U.S. release, and it is disappointing. Medell n's teen princess Reina wants to go to America for reasons she can't quite articulate; her different color eyes, however, speak directly to patsy Marlon Cruz, who narrates, unreliably, in two time frames: their flight "through the bottom" the horrible trip up Central America and through Mexico and Marlon's year following an accidental separation from Reina. In the latter, he is rescued, Maria Full of Grace style, by Patricia, the wife of a Colombian restaurateur in Queens, and learns to fit into the Colombian enclave in New York City; Franco's vignettes of expatriate Colombian life are the best things in the novel, particularly those involving a professional shoplifter and amateur dandy, Roger Pena. But Marlon, whose musings rarely rise above the level of "I really miss Reina," never understands what drives her, and the final discovery that she is, perhaps, no good comes as a surprise to no one but him.
Customer Reviews
Paraíso travel
Realmente espectacular, es un gran escritor.