'Infinite Country' review: The traumas of a family torn apart

Patricia Engel has written a new novel, "Infinite Country." Credit: Elliot and Eric Jimenez
INFINITE COUNTRY by Patricia Engel (Avid Reader Press, 208 pp., $25)
Patricia Engel's novels don't begin so much as they crack open, and her latest, "Infinite Country," is no exception. It leads with a surprising act of violence.
At a reformatory in the Colombian mountains, a group of girls, "some of whom were murderers on the verge," lures a nun into their room with cries of "Fire!," subdues her and escapes. The mastermind of this plot is 15-year-old Talia, an American born to Colombian immigrants and sentenced to the prison school after she burned a man in Bogotá with hot oil as revenge for a murdered cat.
Engel, a gifted storyteller, understands that the threat of violence is a constant in people's lives and that emotional acts of abuse can be as harmful as physical ones. In "Infinite Country," she focuses on the psychological injury that results when families are "split as if by an ax" for political or economic reasons.
Talia is the youngest daughter of Elena and Mauro, who at the beginning of this century leave Colombia for the United States. Exhausted by the violence that has ravaged their country and eager to provide safety and financial security for their baby, Karina, the couple acquire six-month tourist visas and head to Texas for "a long vacation of sorts." They plan to find work, save as much money as they can and return home in a better state.
The feeling that they will forever be viewed as foreigners in this land soon becomes overwhelming, and Elena and Mauro decide to return to Bogotá. But when Elena becomes pregnant, they make the difficult choice to stay in the United States, where they will live in fear of deportation but will also cling to the hope of permanent residency and the belief that their American-born son, Nando, will have "double the possibilities for his future."
The family pursues opportunity along the East Coast, in Delaware (where Talia is born), South Carolina and eventually New Jersey, where Mauro is arrested after an altercation in a bar and deported. When the father will be reunited with his family is unclear, but the trauma of the separation is permanent.
Engel, whose parents are Colombian, is sensitive to what Mauro describes as the "particular pain" that awaits anyone who leaves one country for the dream of another.
At its best, Engel's novel interrogates the idea of American exceptionalism, though the term never appears in the book. Elena discovers that senseless killings are as endemic in the United States as they are in Colombia.
"Infinite Country" falters when, late in the book, Engel hands over the narration to Karina and Nando in a well-intentioned if discordant gesture to bring these previously unexamined characters into the foreground.
It's not a fatal error. Engel brings the story of Elena and Mauro, and that of Talia's quest for freedom, to a satisfying close. And in literature, as in life, the question of citizenship, of what it means to belong to a country and to have a country belong to you, remains unresolved. "I haven't yet figured out if by the place of my birth I was betrayed or I am the betrayer," Karina says, "or why this particular nation and not some other should be our family pendulum."
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