Encompassing works published from 1975 to 2013, this collection by Murgu\u00eda reflects a flinty but compassionate sensibility, focused on people struggling on society\u2019s lower rungs, especially in the Bay Area. The title story exemplifies the approach, narrated by a San Francisco building inspector investigating a fatal Mission District fire; the story encompasses the narrator\u2019s personal heartache, a gentrifying community, and civic corruption in sharp, noirish language. (\u201cThe other barrio\u201d is a euphemism for death.) The settings may vary\u2014the Mexican film industry in \u201cBoy on a Wooden Horse,\u201d a Day of the Dead festival in \u201cOfrendas,\u201d a Half Moon Bay dive bar in \u201cEl \u00daltimo Round\u201d\u2014but the mood is typically dark, focused on the narrators\u2019 past losses, usually romantic ones. A number of the pieces are short, little more than sketches, but when Murgu\u00eda uses a wider canvas, he reveals some winning hard-luck characters: The narrator of \u201cA Toda M\u00e1quina\u201d has been working to stay sober, but a chance encounter with a woman at a Sacramento, California, convenience store sets him unraveling. These characters are at once shaped and undone by old-fashioned masculinity, from the hard-edged young men in \u201cWinnemucca Barbershop\u201d to the veteran dance instructor in \u201cA Lesson in Merengue.\u201d The sad-sack men can get repetitively gloomy (\u201cIf women are a puzzle, this one had a thousand mismatched pieces,\u201d the \u201cM\u00e1quina\u201d narrator laments), but there are some welcome outliers: \u201cBye-Bye Vallarta,\u201d about a woman changing her life\u2019s direction while on a trip to Mexico; \u201cA Subtle Plague,\u201d a kind of ghost story about gentrification; and the sinuous closing prose-poem, \u201cA Sentence,\u201d interweaving details of Latin American folklore and history with references to the lust and heartbreak that drive the author\u2019s work.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Encompassing works published from 1975 to 2013, this collection by Murgu\u00eda reflects a flinty but compassionate sensibility, focused on people struggling on society\u2019s lower rungs, especially in the Bay Area. The title story exemplifies the approach, narrated by a San Francisco building inspector investigating a fatal Mission District fire; the story encompasses the narrator\u2019s personal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4263,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4262"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}