A poetics of the unspoken

Monkey Hunting

A Novel

Cristina Garcia

Alfred A. Knopf: 258 pp., $23

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Of trumpeter Miles Davis’ distinctive style, it was often said that the notes left unplayed were the most important. Economy is an endangered artistic virtue in an information culture that seems to value size, speed and density above all else. But to go back and listen to a hushed, languid Davis solo from an album such as “Kind of Blue” or “Sketches of Spain” is to reacquaint oneself with the beauty of what’s not there: single muted tones released to wander by themselves over four or more bars, mere fragments of melodies that paradoxically tell more about the song than the full melodies ever could.

When writers are likened to jazz musicians, it’s usually in admiration of a startling linguistic virtuosity or an unbridled imagination; it might be noted, for example, that a novelist possesses a pyrotechnic energy to match that of Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie. But Cristina Garcia’s new novel, “Monkey Hunting,” is much more like one of those haunting Davis solos. Like the trumpeter, Garcia has a rare gift for concentrating beauty by leaving things out. Here is a miracle of poetic compression, a novel that manages to trace four generations of a family not by revealing every last detail of personal histories but rather by revealing people’s dreams, their unuttered concerns and observations -- the things that strike them when they hear the hoot of an owl, or when they try on a pair of their great-grandfather’s glasses in front of a mirror.

At the core of “Monkey Hunting” is the figure of Chen Pan, a young Chinese farmer who voyages to Cuba in search of riches and adventure in the mid-1800s only to be tricked into the miserable life of a slave on a sugar plantation. Eventually escaping his tormentors, Chen Pan moves to Havana and proceeds to build a prosperous business in that city’s nascent Chinatown, a curiosity shop called the Lucky Find. When the time comes for him to take a wife, the sensibly mercantile Chen Pan does what seems most logical: He buys one, Lucrecia, a mulatto slave. After the death of her infant son -- the product of an incestuous rape by her slave master-father -- Chen Pan and Lucrecia start a family of their own. Their offspring, “a whole new race -- brown children with Chinese eyes who spoke Spanish and a smattering of Abakua,” will make up the second tier of a family tree that will stretch back and forth across oceans and epochs, from China to Cuba to New York to Vietnam.

Garcia, who was born in Cuba and whose previous novels, “The Aguero Sisters” and “Dreaming in Cuban,” also dealt with the awkward trajectories of assimilation, has found a way to assemble the wistful ghost-memories of her homeland into a lively backdrop whose gravity keeps her characters from floating away into their reveries. Chen Pan’s Havana is electric with sights, sounds, tastes and smells. Street vendors hawk their “fresh okra and star apples, sugarplums, parakeets and pigs’ feet.” Nearby a man sells “giant fireflies, six for twenty-five cents.” Whether she’s writing about the food stalls in Chinatown, the lovingly tended graves in the city’s Chinese cemetery or even the absurd assortment of curios in the Lucky Find, Garcia savors her descriptions and never rushes through any of them, carefully building for us a Havana of cinematic vividness, detail by shimmering detail.

A story about the merging of Chinese and Cuban cultures gives Garcia a chance to draw comparisons between their poetic traditions, the former rooted in an age-old imagism that finds objective correlatives for human emotions in raindrops, lotus petals, birdsong and other natural phenomena, the latter belonging to a long Spanish-language tradition of poems fueled by erotic yearning. These traditions meet in “Monkey Hunting,” whose characters are all poets to some degree, or who at least process the world as poets do: economically, thoughtfully, always paying special attention to the symbolic value of concrete experience. Chen Pan takes regular comfort in the wisdom of ancient Chinese poetry; a century after his birth, his granddaughter, pining for a lost lover, will describe her agony using the ominous verse of barrenness: “Outside my window, the magnolia tree has not flowered. Crows fill its branches, three or four dozen at once. No spring onions are left in my flowerpots.”

Later that granddaughter, a teacher of world literature, will waste away in one of Mao’s prisons, charged with spreading decadence. A great-grandson of Chen Pan’s will escape from Havana to New York with his father after the Cuban revolution, leaving behind a mother only too happy to replace snapshots of her traitorous son and husband with photos of Fidel; the son will end up trying to stave off the annihilation of still another poetic culture by a totalitarian regime, this time in the jungles of Vietnam, not far from the land where his great-grandfather was born. Poetry, Garcia reminds us, is never completely safe from grievous assault by utopians with guns, and even the sturdiest branches of family trees are often no match for the crushing weight of ideology.

Yet poems, and families, somehow survive. Like Jeffrey Eugenides’ “Middlesex,” which attempted to tell the story of a single rogue gene winding its way through three generations of a Greek American family, “Monkey Hunting” is ultimately about what gets passed down. In this case, it’s not a gene but a sensibility: a way of seeing and hearing and feeling things. In 1860s Cuba, Chen Pan buys a slave and tenderly frees her; she rewards him by happily bearing and raising his children. A century later, their descendant does what little he can to free a different kind of slave, a prostitute from the streets of Saigon. Chen Pan shuffles about the prison cell of old age, dreaming of revisiting the China he left long ago, just as his granddaughter, dying in a Chinese jail, dreams of being released and moving to a Cuba she’s never seen.

To inherit the sensibility of one’s ancestors is to inherit a mirror that magically stores all of its reflections. Without treacle or trickery, “Monkey Hunting” follows one such mirror’s long line of bequeathal, and in doing so presents us with characters we come to care about deeply. We don’t follow them throughout their entire lives, and we don’t need to get the true sense of who they are. With the confidence of an artist who knows exactly what can be left out, Garcia has made a small masterpiece -- an epic of anecdotes, a vista of brief and beautiful glimpses.

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From ‘Monkey Hunting’

Late one afternoon, a magnificent thundershower obscured the fields. The slaves couldn’t see to the ends of their machetes, but they were forced to keep cutting cane just the same. In the blurring confusion, Chen Pan caught sight of El Bigote shouting orders at a field boss. He picked up a sharp stone, aimed carefully, then hurled it at the overseer’s temple -- the very spot, Chen Pan knew, that if hit correctly would instantly kill a man.

Every slave was whipped ... but nobody confessed to the crime or to having witnessed it. No one said a word to Chen Pan either, but the slaves offered him small tributes. He got his pick of the machetes at dawn and was permitted to drink first from the noontime water trough. Akua mbori boroki nangue, the Africans murmured. The goat is castrated only once.