"Revolutions," he was saying, "are never what they seem."
"In his mind, revolutions and shark attacks were one and the same."
'Until We're Fish' by Susanna R. Drissi is more than just a coming of age story, though in the early pages we do experience just that for young Elio, Pepe, and Maria. In fact, the book opens with a bit of a horrifying event.. which really sets the tone for the story.
Set amidst the backdrop of the Cuban Revolution, at first literally nothing but background noise and later becoming a central part of every day life.. the book follows Elio on his quest for Maria's love, the evolution of a friendship he never wanted to have with Pepe, and the reality that plagues them all.
The prose is lyrical and the mood.. mostly somber.. and though the characters struggle, there's a recurring theme of hope.. no matter how hard things seem to get for them.
Elio is really charming. His situation is awful when we meet him and only gets worse, but goodness he tries. He tries to be good and do the right thing, tries to be supportive where he can, and most of all.. tries to keep his head up. He has plenty of little idiosyncrasies and his fair share of trauma.. both emotional and physical, but through it all he mostly maintains that goodness.
That's exactly what makes me dislike everyone around him.. at least a little. At critical times, they're not there when he needs them.. or they openly clash with him, leaving him to be ridiculed at best. Even amongst those who should be there for him.. the relationships just seem very imbalanced.
"Time slipped and fell around her, unanchored. As if parts of her had already begun to drift away."
Now.. I'm not a big history buff, so I can't really dispute the traces I saw in this story. Through a little quick research, I did verify the country suffered things called 'Repudiation Rallies'.. whereby people who were believed to be planning or hoping to leave (possibly even if this wasn't the case).. we're often physically or verbally insulted, or arrested and punished some other way.. as a way of hoping they'd decide to stay. Because.. I suppose making someone's already unhappy life worse.. would totally do that.. right? If it some cases it did succeed, I imagine those people must have been just about terrified as to what else might await them.
It's definitely a tough tale and the likelihood it may be rooted in more truth than I would hope is a hard one to stomach. After what I've seen in of leadership my own home country this year, it certainly doesn't strike me as out of the realm of possibility either. The threat of personal oversight is all laid out here in all its ugly truths.. with friends turning on each other to get their basic needs filled, oppression instilled by a government figure, and fed by the people.. who in reality are just helping that figure keep them down too.
"The guy was allergic to words, let alone ones that might turn into sentences and run for hundreds of pages, only to be continued in Part II."
I recommend giving this story a read. Though it's technically fiction, the glimpse it gives into the struggle people deal with in similar situations.. will be eye-opening. Though I certainly feel like it's still a soft, gauzy representation of those miseries.. it's something to think about and oh.. how the hearts of these undeniably resilient people moved me.
Bravo.