The cover alone is enough to recommend this sensuous novel from the author of Dreaming in Cuban. It depicts the back of the shapely body of the Lady Matador, gazing in a mirror, holding her cape and wearing only long pink stockings. The reflection in the mirror shows her tip-tilted eyes--Suki Palacios is a Japanese-Mexican-American matadora.
Open the book and you will immediately fall, happily, into this tropical, unnamed Central American setting, where six variously troubled lives intersecting at the Hotel Miraflor. Two familiar themes are revisited here: the "Grand Hotel"--any book or movie following the activities of various people in a large, busy place, with some of the characters' lives overlapping in odd ways and some of them remaining unaware of one another's existence--and magical realism, that Marquezian device whereby the real-here-and-now is informed by the otherworldly. Both are used to good effect.
Suki is at the hotel to compete in the first Battle of the Lady Matadors in the Americas. She follows rituals slavishly: donning her clothes in a certain order, lighting 14 candles for her deceased mother, eating a perfect pear before leaving the hotel and, "for extra luck, silent sex with a stranger two days before a fight."
Aura, a former guerrilla, works in the garden restaurant of the hotel, following her own ritual: spitting on the order she delivers to the colonel who murdered her brother. She is polite and subservient as she plots how she will kill him. Her brother, Julio, "arrives differently each time--on a gust of wind, in the plaintive call of a mourning dove, with the shifting, whispering leaves." He is exhorting her to avenge his death.
Won Kim is a Korean businessman whose business is failing, whose 15-year-old mistress is greatly pregnant and ensconced in the honeymoon suite at the hotel, costing him a fortune. He is contemplating suicide. There is a poet, Ricardo Morán, married to a harridan with whom he has just adopted a child through Gertrudis Stüber, a German lawyer who exploits poor peasant girls in rent-a-womb schemes to fulfill the wishes of wealthy foreigners. Colonel Martín Abel, the object of Aura's plot, makes speeches, lusts after the matadora and rails against his ex-wife, set to remarry and deprive him of his sons.
These players move on and off the stage in a rondo of events, with the exploits of the matadora providing the counterpoint. All six lives will be forever changed before Cristina García finishes weaving her multi-faceted, riveting story. She has created six disparate characters and stories and interspersed them with "news flashes" from the world outside the hotel, all told with wit, desperation, humor, pathos and heroism, shot through with gorgeous prose.--Valerie Ryan
Shelf Talker: Six troubed lives intersect in a Central American hotel as a matadora readies herself to compete in the first Battle of the Lady Matadors in the Americas.