Remarkable collection of 8 views of an event and its aftermath. Fascinating for the perspectives alone, but this also hits what seems to be one my favorite things, an oblique look at a form of war. ( )

ANTONIO RUIZ-CAMACHO
Barefoot Dogs: Stories
FICTION
New York: Scribner
Hardcover, 978-147684960 (also available as ebook)
156 pages, $23.00
March 10, 2015
Reviewed for Lone Star Literary Life by Michelle Newby, 4.5.15



Most of the Mexicans we read about in the United States are immigrants, maids, janitors, day laborers, and the like. In this country we don’t often read about Mexicans in Mexico unless they’re drug lords – cartel kingpins and their enforcers – or the poor, desperate classes victimized by them. We almost never get fiction in English telling the other side of that conflict. So Antonio Ruiz-Camacho’s Barefoot Dogs: Stories is a rare thing on this side of the Rio Bravo.

Ruiz-Camacho tells the stories of the wealthy, privileged, cultured, and ambitious (let’s go ahead and call them plutocrats) Arteaga family of Mexico City. He has an uncanny ear for the prattle of pampered children trying adulthood on for size and for conveying their sheltered lives:

“It is the year we meet people who don’t live in the same neighborhoods as us….It is the year we get to know real artists who rent studios in dangerous districts on the other side of the city, and it is the year we socialize with historians and anthropologists and performance artists and book editors who live paycheck to paycheck and don’t have cars; these are fascinating, glamorous people who ride the subway and take taxicabs.”

It turns out to also be the year of kidnappings when the patriarch fails to come home from the office one day – the year the blinders come off. This collection of linked short fiction follows the diminished fortunes of the children and grandchildren who are forced to flee the country for their own safety.

“Okie” follows grandson Bernardo, a third-grader acting out as he tries to adjust to a new life with his parents in Palo Alto. In “Origami Prunes,” set in Austin, daughter Laura indulges a certain nihilism as she searches for purpose. Grandchildren Homero and Ximena are stranded in New York before their parents join them, high on whatever they can find, trying to escape homesickness and limbo.

Perhaps most movingly, “Deers” is told from the point of view of Laura’s maid who had to leave her own children in Mexico when the Arteagas fled – not all privilege has been left behind. The bear in the McDonald’s is an apt metaphor for the Arteagas diaspora; they’re all in unfamiliar places, trying to figure out how they got there and how to get home. In “Better Latitude,” the grandfather’s mistress (“He loved us the same way people like him love pedigree dogs, expensive cars, time-shares in Acapulco”) tries to shield their son from Mexico’s version of strange fruit while deciding whether they should leave, too, because her child carries his father’s name. Martin and Catalina try to adjust to the alien landscape of Madrid with their infant son. It doesn’t help that visions of Grandpa continue to haunt them as they scatter.

In the end, Grandpa is not the only one lost – they all are. Barefoot Dogs is an exploration of the reverberations of violence in the lives of the survivors. ( )

These days I really have trouble figuring out when a series of linked stories is called a novel and when it is just a collection. The debut collection of Antonio Ruiz-Camacho is too short to qualify as a novel (even you use a rather loose term for it so probably this is one of the reasons it is published as stories. Or maybe because it would have made a pretty unconventional novel - considering that we rarely see the same people twice. But no matter how it is called, the 8 stories in this tome are connected - sometimes explicitly, sometimes not so much and can be read as a chronicle of a family in distress. Not the distress brought by lack of money or any natural cataclysm - quite the opposite - it is a very wealthy Mexican family which looses its patriarch under pretty weird circumstances (he just never gets home after work one day) and what follows forces the family to flee the country. The reader would not know what really happened until the last 2 stories - not because the narrators do not know but because they know it well enough so that they do not need to share it.

What a novel would not have allowed but the series of stories does is the different styles and narrators. Each story stands on its own and is quite different from the others (and that is surprising for in my experience first time writers even when pretending to do very different stories, always have something that marks them as their stories; some stylistic peculiarity that marks their work. In the case of Ruiz-Camacho that's missing - unless if you count his control of the words for a peculiarity.

In the first story, "It will Be Awesome Before Spring" we meet one of the granddaughters - before the world had changed, when she still has the plan for the vacation; when living in Mexico is safe and she is used to privileges and special treatment. But she writes the story after the inevitable happens, after the grandfather had never come home and in the middle of the young and bored and privileged girl's voice, you can hear the undercurrent of the loss not just of her grandfather but of a lifestyle; the loss of innocence.

The second story, "Okie" opens after the family split and parts of it are out of the country. The young boy that tells the story knows that something happened but does not understand what or understand why he had to move to California. The young voice is believable and it breaks your heart reading about the live-in maid that moved with the family and the boy's reaction of the happening; his lack of understanding shines through the narrative and his actions and even if some of them are bizarre and weird, they kinda sound like someone his age will do.

On the other hand, the main protagonist (although not a narrator) of the third story "Origami Prunes" should know better - she is older, she is one of the daughters (and the mother of the original story protagonist). But as the boy in California, she is caught in her own world in Austin. This story is the only one not told by someone from the family (or a maid) and is the first glimpse we have from outside. Not a big one considering that Laura is borderline crazy (or so it sounds like) and the narrator is more interested in bedding her that figuring out why things are the way they are. The end of the story jumps in the future, to the time when our narrator will meet the family again - with all the news and heartbreaks that this entails.

These first 3 stories are pretty conventional in style and set the expectations for a competent collection that just follows the family without any special writing or variety in style. The next two are anything but.

"I Clench My Hands into Fists and They Look Like Someone Else's" is entirely written as a dialog - between two of the grandchildren (from a branch we had not seen before). The girl and the boy are shipped to Manhattan, awaiting for their family to join them and the experiments with drugs and the loneliness leads to some pretty bizarre parts of the dialog (or is the next door neighbor crazy after all?). As a stylistic choice the story works and it does add some more details to the happening in the Mexico but I found it a bit longer than it should have been...

The 5th story, "Deers" is the first to be told by one of the maids that moved of the family - it is the story that will confirm that Laura was indeed not very stable (the protagonist of the third story) and will explore what happens with these women that left families behind to move with the families they work with. The story is framed with a bear attacking a local McDonalds and the workers gathering around it waiting to see what happens. Susana had started working in the chain after being thrown out by Laura and the story is told with her voice - uneducated, hushed and way too fast. You know the way - very fast, without taking a breath, moving from one topic to another - it seems to be heard a lot from Mexican women (or at least I hear it from Mexican women where I live now; my grandmother back in Bulgaria could go on a speech like that as well so it is more universal than just Mexico). A story that incorporates other stories and direct speech and never takes a breath. The author went with that, by writing the whole story as a single sentence (15 pages of it) but without making it sound as a sentence - it sounds alive and you can imagine the speaker while reading it. All of the previous stories are touching on grief and loneliness and parenthood but that is the one from the viewpoint of the poor - where all this is added to poverty and lack of choices and in the case of Susana's friend - the loss of a child. It is almost a counterpoint to the whole book - the rich lost the patriarch; the poor lost a child (some literary, some not so much). But at the end it is the same story - grief and longing - universal and eternal.

And then follows the second story actually set in Mexico City (after the opener) where the lover of our missing man is taking care of his 6 years son. Because as it turns out in "Better Latitude", our guy does not just have his grown up kids - he also have a second family - one with a lot less choices than the official one. The story is a talk/letter of the lover to the man, heartfelt and calm - describing her world and days and longing for him. It also contains some pointers to what happened with the man but you realize that only in hindsight, after you know what happened. And as in some of the previous stories, the ghost of Jose Victoriano Arteaga shows up - which does not make the story supernatural or non-mundane. It is the way for various people to cope with the loss - in this case the 6 years old son meets his father every day - his loss and longing allows him to create this imaginary friend the way only little kids can. The reaction of the family when they learn about her and the child is expected and at the same time makes you wonder what kind of a man did not make provisions for this second family of his. At the end the story works as what it is - a young woman's love letter to a man she had lost too fast after she had lost everything to have him and his child.

The 7th story. "Her Odor First", is the only one that I did not like. Told from a maid's perspective, the one that stayed home with the son of the family to look after him while he looks after the family interests, it is a lyrical and somewhat incoherent piece in yet another style (which does not seem to work for me) and thankfully very short. It does give us the clues for what really happen with Arteaga - the last story will confirm and expand on it - and why the family split.

And that last story, "Barefoot Dogs", set in Spain makes a full circle - it closes the collection and the story, allows us to meet the last child of the family - the youngest son Martin (not counting Laureano - the mistress's child) and his family. And in another tale of loss, Martin is unable to look at his own child and uses his dog to get out of the house when he can. The son born while the family was expecting and receiving the news about the missing patriarch. It's a weird story - not my favorite by a long shot but I did not really dislike it as the previous one.

At the end, there isn't a story that really stands out. But as a whole I liked the collection as a full story of a family in turmoil, as a study of grief and loss and belonging; as yet another way to show that money cannot buy everything and loss and grief are universal. I wish the author had expanded on some of the topics but the series of vignettes (even the longer pieces can be called that) are just glimpses and allow the reader to make their own connection. The fact that a Family Tree is included at the end of the book is telling - it may be told in 8 separate stories but it is one story and should be read this way and in the order of the book - or some of the messages are lost. Which will probably make the collection somewhat unpopular - the variety of the styles and the need to read all the stories anyway to get the picture sound like a contradiction; on the other hand this is one of the strengths of the collection. ( )