Even now, having sent my novel out into the world, I find that a reporter’s fact-abiding mind-set can be hard to shake. A friend came to dinner recently. She had just read the novel and was eager to discuss the plot, the characters, their motivations, their psychological makeup. I began to feel uneasy, accountable for her investment in people who didn’t exist. I had a sudden urge to apologize to her, to confess that I had, like Janet Cooke and Jayson Blair and other reporters who violated the public’s trust with their fabricated stories, invented those people and everything about them.
I sized up the couple who were ambitious enough to order such a monument of food. She, a yoga lady about the size of my thumb. He, a thin man who seemed more eager for a cigarette than a massive meal. They snapped pictures of the gratuitous dribbles of cheese and delighted in the rainbow shimmer of grease revealed by their phone flashes, then quickly lost interest. There was barely a dent visible in that unconquerable mountain of food.
I picked at my inadequate salad and tried to redirect my romantic attention toward my date, but I was helpless against the allure of the simmering pile of golden-battered food next to him. It was obvious that the uninterested couple wouldn’t finish it. And though I wanted it more than anything, food theft isn’t socially appropriate on a first date, nor in a pandemic, nor ever. I knew from experience that the waitstaff probably threw out five or ten of these platters every night. No one could possibly eat it all.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras calls her new book, “The Man Who Could Move Clouds,” “a memoir of the ghostly.” It tells the story of her grandfather Rafael Contreras Alfonso, or Nono, a Colombian curandero, or healer, who had magical gifts that he passed down to Rojas Contreras and her mother. Nono could speak to the dead and heal the sick. Rojas Contreras’s mother, Sojaila, can see into the future and be in two places at once. Using symbols, family stories and national history, Rojas Contreras threads other characters in and out of a narrative that focuses primarily on the separate bouts of amnesia that led her and her mother to acquire Nono’s spiritual gifts, and their journey, years later, to exhume his body and properly lay him to rest.
“The father, the son. This is the question, isn’t it?” So says Rafik to his child, Fahad, at the outset of Taymour Soomro’s debut novel. The relationship between father and son is one of the dominant themes of “Other Names for Love”. The fraught dynamic between Rafik and Fahad is also one of the key sources of tension in the book—an accomplished work which spans years and explores desire, inheritance and the power of memory.