I already noted that the dude's first novel is going to burn
up USican speculative literature, much like Junot Díaz's novels scorched
literary fiction. Or like Raymond Chandler helped prop the pulp-bar for
crime-detective fiction. Problem is, some critics have no idea what DJ wrote. I
won't bet my last bottle of Don Pedro that I do, either. Daniel Olivas already did The Review of Older, but I got cosas to add.
Reviewers have called this novel: spectral noir, hard-core
fantasy, genre fiction, urban fantasy, Noir, a literary .44 [magnum], mystery,
suspense, supernatural thriller, ghost-detective, plus, there's also
"diverse." If your hood hasn't been totally gentrified-razed of
culture, and you can find a bookstore, I won't guess where you'll find this
book. Except, probably on the chingón-bestseller
table. Where Nora Robert's and Michael Crichton's tomes are trying to edge
themselves away from DanielJosé's, to not get their white pages sullied by some
street Newyorquian noir.
Check it, people--Half-Resurrection
was released. One. Whole. Month. Ago. Jan. 6th. Two weeks--a mere fokkin' 14
days--later comes this announcement:
"Tony Award-winning actress Anika Noni
Rose has optioned TV/film rights to Daniel José Older’s urban fantasy series Bone Street Rumba."
Sheeeet! Not just his first novel
optioned, all his pinche Rumbas. A
debut novelist's dream is to get 1 book optioned. But a whole series? That's no
dream; that's Great Sea Mother Yemaya cradling you, mowing your detractors with
her machete, and blessing your progeny with free-rides through Columbia Univ. So,
someone besides me thinks Older's Rumba books are worth more than a read.
Like some hallucination, while
reading Half-Resurrection Blues, it came to me to compare/contrast
DanielJosé with Chandler and Junot. Chandler's dead and won't give much of a
fokk anymore, and Junot may not concur, pero, así
va.
 |
| He just did't get blacks. |
From Chandler, mostly, The
Big Sleep:
"The
streets were dark with something more than night." [Walter Mosley might define
this is THE writing--terse, snappy, quick-and-move-on-ly.]
"From
30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like
something made up to be seen from 30 feet away." [Ignoring his
white-machismo, this is smooooth.]
“I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell
legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't
like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter
nights.”
“She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks
and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that
trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in
the air.”
DanielJosé doesn't compare to Chandler, though he can
chandler when he's in the mood. I put one pata
en mi boca and state, sin miedo,
that DanielJosé is deeper than Chandler. Period.
Here's some Junot [Díaz]:
“She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so
you'll know loss the rest of your life.” [Male authors of all colors must write
about las mujeres as undiscovered
territory, revealed, que no?]
“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like?
Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia!
Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.”
“Dude, you don't want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy
is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.” [Mujeres as objetos, again.]
“In a better world I would have kissed her over the ice
trays and that would have been the end of all our troubles. But you know
exactly what kind of world we live in. It ain't no fucking Middle-earth. I just
nodded my head, said, See you around, Lola, and drove home.”
“She is sixteen and her skin is the darkness before the
black [better than Chandler's above?], the plum of the day’s light, her breasts
like sunsets trapped beneath her skin, but for all her youth and beauty she has
a sour distrusting expression that only dissolves under the weight of immense
pleasure. Her dreams are spare, lack the propulsion of a mission, her ambition
is without traction. Her fiercest hope? That she will find a man. What she
doesn’t yet know: the cold, the backbreaking drudgery of the factorias, the
loneliness of Diaspora, that she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her
own heart. What else she doesn’t know: that the man next to her would end up
being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years
together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would
never love again.” [Compare to Chandler's paws in the air.]
Chandler's world had "one white dude to rule them
all"--Phillip Marlowe, who knew some Spanish and some mexicanos. Chandler
wrote pulp, knew it, maybe sometimes regretted it, but that was how his U.S.
was and how he worked it.
Junot works the other side of the alley, the immigrant
dominicano better read than described, by me anyway. My point to using him is
to get to unas migas of DanielJosé
[from Half-Resurrection]:
 |
| DanielJosé |
"I dip into a brightly lit tobacco store for some
Malagueñas and a pocket-sized rum. The rum goes into my flask and one of the
Malagueñas goes into my mouth. I light it, walk back out to the street, and
weave through the crowds. When I move quickly, no one notices my strange gait
or the long wooden cane I use to favor my right leg. I've gotten the flow down
so smooth I almost glide along toward the milky darkness of Prospect Park.
There's too much information here in the streets--each passing body gives up a
whole symphony of smells and memories and genetics. It can help pass the time
if you're bored, but tonight, I'm far from bored.
Tonight I am hunting." [There's a gist of the plot,
prosaically.]
"I make a grunty-affirmative noise. When they send me
after a normal ol' fully dead ghost, it's usually to toss their translucent
asses back into Hell or, when they're really acting out, slice 'em to the
Deeper Death. That means they're gone-for-good gone, not just kinda-sorta gone.
It takes some getting used to, yeah, but you figure, hey--they were already
dead once. Not everyone comes back even as a spook, so they had that second
chance and jacked it up by playing the fool. The final good-bye ain't that big
a deal in that sense. But this one . . . this strange, gray-like-me man with
his wild schemes and last-gasp poetics . . . his death hasn't left me since New
Year's.
Neither has his sister's perfect smile." [More about the plot.]
"The feeling follows us down the block, even lingers as
a dull whisper while we trudge up the creaking steps at Mama Esther's. Then we
enter the library, the only room in the entire house with any furniture, and
everything's all right again. There aren't even shelves, just stacks and stacks
of books from floor to ceiling. You'd think it'd be a chaotic mess, all packed
in there like that, but somehow there's a harmony to it; the books seem almost
suspended in midair. They're everywhere, and the room is wide and tall enough
that it doesn't feel cluttered. If I don't clean my little spot in more than a
week, it starts to close in on me, so how Esther keeps this utterly full room
spacious is beyond me. Some ghost shit, I suppose. Either way, it's oddly
comforting.
Esther's floating in her usual spot right in the center of the
room. That's where the head is anyway. Beneath that great girthy smile, her wide
body stretches out into invisibility in a way that lets you know she's got the
whole house tucked within those fat ghostly folds. "Boys." She nods
at us; the warmth of that smile is a sunbath after the grimness of the
ngk." [To learn about the ngk, read the book; they're more than
"imps."]
Maybe all that my selections prove is that I'm horible at examples. But if you want easy
quippy, go pulpy Chandler. If you want Junot, go Junot. But if you want
refreshing, street-smooth, page-flowing noir and Latino spec--ungenred--go DanielJosé.
Publisher's synopsis of Half-Resurrected: "Carlos Delacruz is one of the New York
Council of the Dead’s most unusual agents—an inbetweener, partially resurrected
from a death he barely recalls suffering, after a life that’s missing from his
memory. He thinks he is one of a kind—until he encounters other entities
walking the fine line between life and death.
"One inbetweener is a sorcerer. He’s summoned a horde of implike
ngks capable of eliminating spirits, and they’re spreading through the city
like a plague. They’ve already taken out some of NY Council of the Dead’s
finest, leaving Carlos desperate to stop their master before he opens up the
entrada to the Underworld—which would destroy the balance between the living
and the dead.
"But in uncovering this man’s identity, Carlos confronts the truth
of his own life—and death."
Quién sabe whether
DanielJosé wrote this synopsis, but it leaves me flojo-limp. A plot synopsis goes weak, not providing the reader
much hint of the powerful writing within. On a better day, minus a hangover,
when I was young-sharp, I'd'a shot higher. But maybe that's just me. Decide
whether to purchase the book, by a read of half a random page; the sucker flows
más suave than Carlos glides through las calles de la Nueva.
Las embras who
couldn't get past Yunior's mujeriego
to read Oscar Wao, can enjoy Carlos,
however gray his half-deadness, which incidentally doesn't reek of morbidity. There's
love, of a different kind because it's of a different world. Yemaya's.
 |
| The man paved the way for our spanglishes. |
Here's una cosa I
wonder about DanielJosé's work that Junot carried to the penultimate: the
novel's boriqua Spanish is light,
however great the sabor--sporadic, casi. Junot blew the lid off the
exclusionary Anglo-English-ceiling with a major body-slam [yeah, so sue me for
metaphorical mix] that USican audiences are ready for bestsellers profuse with nuestra lengua (or at least can pretend
to be, entering gentry bistros with Oscar
Wao tucked in their man-purse). I'd prefer more lengua boriqua from DanielJosé. Maybe he was testing the literary
waters. Maybe that's simplemente his
voice, at the moment. Yo no sé, but
I'll ask.
DON'T buy or shoplift Half-Resurrection expecting Yvonne
Navarro-horror. DanielJosé doesn't try to gore your groin or twang your
things-under-the-bed neuroses. He shoots for lifting our sorry-ass, neglected
literary intellects to invented realms of noir experience. Think--Yunior the
immigrant wandering through women to find no truths, brutalized by colonialist
reality, except in Carlos's case, supernatural navigation is what-we-do, and do
fairly well. To plug myself, my Chicano protagonist got bounced around the
walls of his alternate-world, trying to escape. Carlos is sophisticated enough
to chill in his mundo and fulfill his
mission. It's a wild, enjoyable, funk-ride to get there. I recommend you take
it. Later, you might be lucky enough to see it on-screen.
 |
| This pic is an Anika Noni-reminder |
One note about that. The film, the TV series, the whatever,
might become the next blockbuster, but it will fail like a blind, Carlos-crippled
m-f-er the further it meanders from DanielJosé's prose. Sure his dialogue
rules, and, not that I know jack about movie directing, but por favor, Anika Noni, consider employing
an off-screen narrator, a la Anthony Mendez of Jane the Virgin. En serio,
Esa, that's where the art breathes.
A last great lesson I learned from my read of
Half-Resurrection pertains to the mierda
about genre. How especially Latino authors bitch and moan and wonder more where
their work will be slotted. Chuck that. This novels tells me, "Dump the rules,
slaughter the bookstores' shelves-by-genre and publishers' imprint guidelines.
Write your art. Speak yourself. Give your readers what you want. Let the
accolades fall as far from you as they care to. Then again, you might just be
more than noticed, and then get hit with a goddamn-the-dude's-unfairly-lucky
TV/movie option.
Best author profile ever
Not
that I compare--yet--to DanielJosé, but Latin
Post features an author profile on me that I believe you might enjoy, un montón, however strange some of the
revelations. I'd appreciate your leaving comments there to justify my existence
on its pages. With enough readers doing so, I might be asked for a return
engagement. Gracias.
Next This
year, en Havana
Whoever reads this and owns a yacht, meet me in Matamoros
and I'll bring the Negra Modelos and
we'll head to La Isla, before all the turistas
invade. Me tengo que ir, este año. Or, a lo menos, before me muero. ITM, if you're in AridZona
next week, La Bloga's amigo Tom Miller is one of the panelists. Miller knows
more about Cuba than anyone but Fidel. Wishing I could be in either locale:
Es todo, hoy,
RudyG, a.k.a., part-time cheerleader for Half-Resurrection, in case
you missed that,
Tejano David Bowles calls his work, "at the crossroads of myth and
legend, genre and literature." Today
he'll share some of it at Barnes & Noble Northcross in McAllen, Tex., from
2–3 pm. A reading from his YA fantasy novel, The Smoking Mirror, answering questions and signing books. He'll
probably also talk about and share from his book, Border Lore: Folktales and
Legends of South Texas.
Daniel José Older will be speaking, and reading from his Young
Adult urban fantasy, Shadowshaper, at
the Chilltown Lit Fest in Jersey City. 
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