I wonder if I would have enjoyed this book more if I had loved Tentacle less, or if this had been the first book by Indiana that I read. Tentacle was one of my favorite reads of 2019 -- so breathtakingly bonkers with time travel, climate collapse, magical anemones, art theory/criticism/history, class & gender criticism... That book could barely be contained. Made in Saturn keeps just enough of some of the themes, particularly the history and language of art, and the legacy of colonialism and revolution in the Caribbean to feel like the work of the same author, but with all of the speculative elements stripped away and a rather dislikable narrator. (Many of the characters in Tentacle weren't terribly likable either, but with so much going on, it mattered less.) In the end it had interesting things to say, but I can't help hoping Indiana's future books contain more of the wild exuberance of Tentacle. ( )

We meet Argenis in the Havana airport--his father has sent him from the DR to detox. That doesn't go as planned, but we learn a lot about Argenis. When he makes it back to his aunt in the DR, we learn as he does.

Argenis struggles with his family history--and that is what this book is about. He is the younger and un-favored son of a former revolutionary. His parents were revolutionaries in the 60s. His father then flipped and took a position in Balaguer's government, and is now fairly high up. Argenis has little to no respect for his father, or his older brother who was a show-off as a child and is now a businessman who uses their father's connections. Argenis, meanwhile, is an artist and has attended art school. He started with cocaine before becoming hooked on heroin. Does he want to stop? It's unclear, but he DOES want to be able to function, to do his art, to not constantly be on the hunt for his next high.

As he manages to stay off the heroin, he learns more about what his parents, their friends, and his aunt went through--and about his grandmother's life as a maid--he gains some perspective. He has only ever wanted to do art. Not to perform recitations on his father's command as his brother did. Nor to use his father's connections to succeed in business--as his brother does. Yet he also finds it very sad how his grandmother--who now owns her former employers' house--still wears her maid's uniform and sleeps in her maid's room. Though she only serves herself. It seems he is ready to grow up and find a happy medium, if he can stay away from heroin. ( )

This is one weird novel.

Meet Argenis Luna - the son of a politician from the Dominican Republic (who started as a revolutionary together with Che and Castro). When we first meet him, he had been sent by his family to Cuba to try to cure him from his addiction to drugs. Except things in Cuba do not go exactly as planned and the whole trip turns into an attempt to face his past and the demons in it - mostly by creating new ones and burning bridges. Not literally - despite his pedigree.

The first part of the novel, the one set in Cuba almost made me stop reading - it is not a bad novel but it seems to go nowhere and I am not much for the existential thoughts of a recovering addict. The style and the tone does not change when he goes back to the Dominican Republic but something started working a bit differently. Confronting the past becomes the norm and we see that past unfolding in memories - despite his current prominence, the father was never the man he expected to be. Contrasting this with the grandmother (who worked as a domestic all her life) and the aunt (who ran as soon as she could but was not unscathed), the father emerges from the page bigger than life - and makes you realize that Argenis has all the right to be disillusioned and bitter.

By the end of the novel, it seems like all the ghosts of the past are exorcised - at least the ones he started the novel with so he goes on to try to deal with the ones he created himself.

The world is full of news and prose for the revolutions that swept the Caribbean - some more successful, some less. This novel tries to explore the question of "what happened next, when the cameras stopped rolling and people had to go back to their lives". It is not a new question and it is not the first novel to do that and in a way it fails -- things end up too neatly, too orderly while the world does not work that way. But in other ways it succeeds in bringing past and present together and showing a world that exists at the moment, behind the slogans and away from the cameras.

I did not like some parts of the novel but I liked the style so I think I will look for some of the other books by the author. ( )