Search for Utopia, Desire for the Sublime: Cristina García’s <i>Monkey Hunting</i>

Abstract

�� ��� and Vietnam. In just over 250 pages, the novel tells a family history of four generations, covering a time period between a Chinese man’s 1857 migration to Cuba and the middle years of the Vietnam War. It employs third- and fi rst-person points of view, male and female voices, and fragmented sequencing. While Garcia used multiple viewpoints and settings in her fi rst two novels, Monkey Hunting expands in ethnic, geographic, and chronological focus. Moreover, Monkey Hunting defi es tidy genre classifi cation. It blends genres, including the slave narrative, family saga, historical and immigrant fi ction, prose, and poetry. The novel’s beginning seems more like a slave narrative than anything else, but as soon as the protagonist Chen Pan escapes from a Cuban sugar plantation, this description becomes insuffi cient. 2 A helpful family tree signals a family saga, yet the novel’s relative brevity contrasts with celebrated family sagas such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1982). Ethnic mixing in the novel—Chinese and African, Afro-Chinese Cuban and Vietnamese—also impedes neat classifi cation. Perhaps because of some or all of these issues, Monkey Hunting received more mixed reviews than Garcia’s fi rst two novels. 3 While many praised Garcia’s knack for sensuous detail, several reviewers found the novel’s lack of development dissatisfying. Jennifer Schuessler of the New York Times Book Review claims that Monkey Hunting “is an honorable attempt to recover ancestral memories. But all her blossoms and incantations and tears don’t quite succeed in making those ancestors live again” (11), and Michiko Kakutani perceives Monkey Hunting as lacking “the fi erce magic and unexpected humor” (E6) of Dreaming in Cuban and calls the novel’s beginning “workmanlike.” An additional review claims that “Garcia leaves too much story unexplored. The book is succinct at the expense of the fi ne characterizations and plot developments that grace Garcia’s previous works . . . this novel whets, but doesn’t sate, the appetite”