We have selected
The Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar for October. We really enjoyed Tobar's previous take on Los Angeles in
The Tattooed Soldier and are looking forward to this New York Times Notable Book,
With The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most
misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond
the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to
reveal Southern California life as it really is, across its vast,
sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions.
Araceli
is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household—one of three
Mexican employees in a Spanish-style house with lovely views of the
Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking and cleaning,
but the recession has hit, and suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican
standing—unless you count Scott Torres, though you’d never suspect he
was half Mexican but for his last name and an old family photo with
central L.A. in the background. The financial pressure is causing the
kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children shouldn’t hear, and
then one morning, after a particularly dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to
an empty house—except for the two Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens
she’s never had to interact with before. Their parents are unreachable,
and the only family member she knows of is Señor Torres, the subject of
that old family photo. So she does the only thing she can think of and
heads to the bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an
adventure, she tells the boys. If she only knew . . .
With a
precise eye for the telling detail and an unerring way with character,
soaring brilliantly and seamlessly among a panorama of viewpoints, Tobar
calls on all of his experience—as a novelist, a father, a journalist, a
son of Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angeleno—to deliver a novel
as broad, as essential, as alive as the city itself.
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