A Family Tree With Puerto Rican Roots

At the far end of her latest novel, “Eccentric Neighborhoods,” Rosario Ferre (author of a highly acclaimed “House on the Lagoon”) inserts an epigram from “A Thousand and One Nights.” “Telling a story,” Scheherazade says, “goes hand in hand with the knowledge of life: the knowledge of oneself, in oneself, by oneself.”

“Eccentric Neighborhoods” bears some resemblance to the tales that the poor Arabian girl told King Shahryar night after night, making sure to finish one early and get another going--at least as far as the second commercial--so that Shahryar might spare her life that night to hear the end the next day.

The narrator of “Eccentric Neighborhoods,” in search perhaps of the knowledge of herself, rustles through the leaves of her family tree, peering at times as far back as three generations to 19th-century Corsica and Cuba. But the true origin of her story is Puerto Rico. On one side is her mother Clarissa’s family, the Rivas de Santillanas, who live the grand, aristocratic life of the hacendados, with their sugar plantations and peons, tennis courts and soursop trees. On the other side are her father’s family, the Vernets, who work their way up as electricians and engineers to a position as major businessmen and politicians.

There are her mother’s sisters: Tia Dido, the shy poetess who drives her fiance to distraction with her verse, until she is advised by a famous writer that “the best nightingales--the true rui-sen~oras of this world--sing their love songs in secret”; Tia Artemisa, and her beloved Don Esteban, who is mourning for a granddaughter he believes he allowed to freeze to death in France by buying her a coat of Caribbean feathers instead of European ermine; Tia Siglinda, who elopes with the mayor; and Tia Lakhme of the starlet beauty and three husbands.

And then there is her father’s side of the family, Freemasons instead of Catholics, businessmen instead of landowners, supporters of statehood instead of republicanism: Abuelo Chaguito, the diminutive grandfather, who was kidnapped out of Cuba by his own mother; Abuela Adela, his “Statue of Liberty” of a wife; Aurelio, the father of the narrator, the brains and politics of the family; his playboy brother Ulises; and more sisters. And on and on.

The cumulative effect is a portrait of an island that owes as much of its culture to Europe and the United States as to the Caribbean and Latin America. Bechsteins fill the parlors and Reos the driveways. Women are named Venecia in honor of Italian vacations, and men are educated in Boston before returning to take their established positions.

Yet, while the vignettes in “Eccentric Neighborhoods” are pleasantly entertaining, I wouldn’t want to play Arabian Roulette with them. At the end of the day, there is, to hearken back to Scheherazade, too much self and not enough story. The extended families of Catholics, Freemasons and atheists have propagated a neighborhood of 1,001 eccentric characters. What fabulous nights, if only these characters could have dreamed themselves into stories.