Reader Advisory - A Book Review
READER ADVISORY
A Book Review of:
Travel Advisory: Stories of Mexico by David Lida.
William Morrow & Company. 2000. $24.
By Sarita Liebkind
© 2000
This is not a book about Mexico. Its stories could take place on Long Island or Pittsburgh just as easily. As a Mexican resident, I'm offended, and I'm angry. What if someone wrote a handful of short stories about pedophiles, predators, and perverts in Williamsburg and called it "Stories of the Hassidim?"
Now, I don't expect every book with "Mexico" in its title to paint one of those quaint pictures of some guy riding a bike with a donkey on his head, or to even deliver yet another paean to the author's wife's radiant ebon tresses against the light of the camelinas. But I do expect even fiction to deliver a modicum of character and place. "Travel Advisory" delivers nothing but a sense of malevolence which exceeds the most vitriolic of raping and pillaging armies. On the book jacket, David Lida claims to divide his time between his native New York City and Mexico City, yet the publisher's interview which accompanied the review copy revealed he lives in New York after a whopping two years' residency in Mexico almost a decade ago.
In any event, he leaves the reader with a distinct impression that his familiarity with Mexico is limited. On the other hand, he may simply inhibit a more priapic world than mine.
Cheap gringos. Cheap f**kin' gringos. All of them come to Mexico for a quick thrill, ersatz mysticism, mind-altering substances and experiences flowing like smog from a linea roja bus, spending infected bodily fluids faster than you can say "Moctezuma's Revenge." Every caricature in these stories is a predator, oafish and adolescent, inhabiting clearly demarcated zones of black and white, rich and poor, powerful and subjugated. This tone of ugliness and squalor pervades almost every story in "Travel Advisory", rife with misogyny and anti-Semitism.
Even though Lida paints his characters as one-dimensional, sentient and as disposable as cardboard figures, he's got an excellent nose and eye for atmosphere. From the musty, rodent-scented aura of a cheap hotel in a dank Gulf Coast town to the Camino Real, Lida picks up on detail.
Let's take "La Quedada", the story of a spurned Jewish Aztec Princess. Substitute Polanco and Tecamachalco for any number of Jewish neighborhoods around the world from Istanbul to Des Moines, and the story's the same. It's not about Mexico at all. "Bewitched", straight down to the witches and the roaches and naïve journalist with "sociably pert" breasts, could as easily be set in the Bronx or rural Louisiana.
David Lida fooled me, all right. I'd taken him to be right out of a writer's workshop at NYU, but I learned that he never went to college. Unfortunately, his style, while formulaically correct, is burdened by all the markings of the "Aren't we ever so hip living just a few blocks from Washington Square." Lose the fake erudition, David, and lighten up. Find some charity and mercy in even your most evil characters, and don't be afraid to use some gray tones. Quit trying so hard to shock, and relax. After all, Philip Roth's early books marked him as a Jewish anti-Semite. You've got all the potential to deliver a better product than this one, and I think you just might.
Readers, "Travel Advisory" begs for truth in labeling. You've been conned if you anticipated this one was anything about Mexico.
An excerpt from one of the stories, "Taxi," can be found at: http://www.mexicanwave.com/books/lida.asp
And a complete story, "Regrets," can be found at: http://www.lavitrina.com/html/19/literature/books.html
VERDICT: Wait for this one to hit the remainder table.
Sarita Liebkind is the pseudonym of an American writer living in Mexico.