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Time Travel
A Review by Margot Livesey

Like many other sagas of emigrants and emigration, including Cristina García's own Dreaming in Cuban, the one contained in Monkey Hunting cannot be told in a single generation. The novel opens with a family tree, and the names and dates marching down the page provide the reader's first glimpse of the scope and complex ambitions of the story that lies ahead. How does Chen Pan, born in China in 1837, end up with the black slave Lucrecia? And how does his descendant Domingo Chen, born in 1950, end up having a child with the Vietnamese woman Tham Thanh Lan? The answers to these questions and to the central questions of emigrant life -- Where do we choose to call home, and will that place make us welcome? -- form much of the subject matter of this exhilarating new work.

At the center of the novel is the resourceful, lucky, tenderhearted Chen Pan. As a young man he flees his desolate village in China, where the crops are rotting and bandits are roaming, and allows himself to be tempted by a vision of wealth and warmth in a distant place called Cuba. But after surviving a dreadful voyage he finds himself working as a slave on a sugar plantation. Once again he survives, and escapes to make his way to Havana, where he opens a secondhand shop, the Lucky Find.

One of the dangers of a narrative that jumps without warning from Cuba in 1860 to New York in 1968 to Shanghai in 1924 is that the reader can easily be left behind. But such is the force of García's sensual, warm, witty prose that even when I didn't entirely understand her choices, I was happy to follow wherever she led. How could I, a Scot, resist a narrator who claims that British tourists to Cuba will pay a premium for any souvenir "sporting a pig"? Or describes a woman's eyes near the moment of death as "unusually large, the whites clean as starched napkins"? I soon found myself deeply attached to both major and minor characters. And as I turned the pages, I began to understand that García combines her gorgeous writing with a relentless view of history and a fierce understanding of the degree to which the individual life is at the mercy of larger forces. This is a lesson that many of us in the West have until recently been privileged to ignore, but we may soon be relearning it.

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