Book Review: Holy Radishes

Title: Holy Radishes

Author: Roberto G. Fernández

Date: 1995

Publisher: Arte Publico

ISBN: 1-55885-076-7

Length: 298 pages

Quote: “On the first page was her favorite picture: ‘1940 Yacht Club Dance.’”

This is a novel about Nellie, one of the nightclub dancers in the Yacht Club in 1940, and her family, and why she moved from Cuba to Florida—and why she wants to go back. Nellie has had a long and frankly improbable life, and although, in the kitchen, sometimes she wishes to “turn the bell pepper into Delfina, the onion into Tomasa, and the garlic clove into Agripina,” the person from her past whom she really can’t forget is her pet pig, Rigoletto. People keep telling her different stories about what happened to him and whether he might still be alive. Nellie would never knowingly have hurt her pig but, according to one story, when they all got hungry enough that nobody else could bear to continue feeding him, Nellie ate her share of him with gusto.

Nellie knows her parents are dead, and her husband has an idiotic midlife crush on a gum-chewing girl. What she has left to look forward to is going back to Cuba, and although Cuba has not improved much since she left...this is a comic novel, so you have some idea how it’s going to end.

What you’ll like—if you like it—is the wackiness of this story. People act shamefully and nobly but mostly they act comically. This is not the true story of a Cuban immigrant, nor is it a composite story from several Cuban immigrants. It’s a parable, or a parody, or both. The light down there is tropical, colors seem brighter, birds and flowers and especially insects grow bigger, the reality can be strange and silly enough...but Holy Radishes is over-the-top silly. It’s Macondo redux, Cuban immigrant stories as they might have been narrated by a García Márquez character who’d eaten beans before bed.

What you’ll not like is that those lively bean dreams can be pretty horrific when you think about them, and some of these are. Someone who might have been shot, or declared and then rendered insane, in real Cuba, appears in this novel as having been basically left to die of thirst but then thrown from a tower window onto a rocky beach. Someone who might say ugly things about Cubans or refuse to rent a house to one, in real Florida, appears in this novel leading a pack of scumbags to burn down a whole neighborhood with blazing arrows. It’s funny because it’s cartoonish, like a Dali painting; if this story were remotely lifelike, like a Dali painting, it would be horrible.

Nevertheless, Nellie’s undying love for her pet pig will conquer all in the end. Many find this novel amusing, overall. You might too.