When she does elevate the language, Engel gives startling dimension to her characters’ emotions. It implies people like my mother and me don’t exist without a paper trail … Don’t tell me I’m undocumented when my name is tattooed on my father’s arm.” The writing is fiery it’s reminiscent of Engel’s vibrant first book Vida (2010). Karina writes, “I hate the term undocumented. In later chapters, Engel gives us Nando’s and Karina’s first-person narratives in raw, conversational language. Consider Elena’s observation about her young children: “Karina and Nando already knew to fear police.” These eight spare words drive home a bald truth-that even as children, they understand and fear family separation. The lack of embellishment lends an unflinching frankness to Infinite Country. There was a time when these continents were borderless.Įngel uses plain, natural language to untangle the family’s history.
Through these myths about the Colombian landscape and its animals, he reminds Talia that there was a time before colonization. While Talia’s precipitous journey provides the novel’s through line, Mauro’s stories from the indigenous Muisca tradition are its thematic ground. The youthful decision to seek opportunity abroad has evolved into a question neither Mauro nor Elena can answer-will the family ever be whole again? Though Elena plans to bring Talia back soon, fifteen years pass. Shortly after Talia is born, Mauro’s sudden deportation forces Elena to make a choice. They have left behind the limitations of one country only to find themselves confined again. They fall into a cycle of seeking work and dodging immigration authorities. Faced with the latest violence in Bogotá and the birth of their son Nando, they overstay their visa. They plan to earn US dollars and return to Bogotá in six months.Ĭircumstances converge to rewrite Elena and Mauro’s decision. Mauro and Elena are young lovebirds with few prospects in chronically violent Colombia, “where it felt impossible to get ahead if one wasn’t born to a certain class, rich or corrupt, or talented and beautiful enough for fútbol and farándula.” In 2000, they head to Houston with their first daughter, Karina. This might be her only chance to reunite with her estranged mother and siblings in New Jersey.Īs Talia hitchhikes toward the capital, Engel unfolds her parents’ story. She’s determined to cross more than two hundred miles to get to Bogotá, where her father has her plane ticket to the United States. This deeply empathetic novel charts one family’s years-long struggle to reunite after immigration laws have wrenched them apart.Īs the book opens, fifteen-year-old Talia escapes from an all-girls’ correctional facility in the mountains of Colombia.
Infinite Country is Colombian-American writer Patricia Engel’s masterful fourth book.
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