When Elena and Mauro move to the United States with their newborn, then decide to overstay their visas, the cruelty of deportation sunders their growing family, but never their bonds.
Talia is set to reunite with her family after a lifetime of long-distance love on different continents, which began when Elena made the impossible choice to send her American-born infant daughter back to Colombia, following the deportation of the family patriarch, Mauro.Įngel’s sweeping novel gives voice to three generations of this mixed-status Colombian family, torn apart by man-made borders. The plane will take teenage Talia to the United States, where her mother, Elena, and her older siblings, Karina and Nando, live in New Jersey. (Mar.Infinite Country, Patricia Engel’s heartbreaking fourth novel, opens with an unforgettable sentence: “It was her idea to tie up the nun.” In Engel’s gripping first chapter, a teenage girl makes a high-octane escape from a Catholic reform school in the misty mountains of Colombia, setting in motion her treacherous hitchhike to Bogotá, where she has a plane to catch. The narrative moves between past and present to chronicle Talia’s travails-first sent back to Colombia to live with her grandmother as a young girl, and later hitchhiking to Bogotá to meet Mauro-and the lives of Elena and Mauro, revealing the struggles of undocumented migrants and exploring “how people who do horrible things can be victims, and how victims can be people who do horrible things.” Engel’s sharp, unflinching narrative teems with insight and dazzles with a confident, slyly sophisticated structure.
But the family is separated when Mauro is deported for driving without a license.
Her parents, Elena and Mauro, fell in love as teenagers and had a child before fleeing from the violence, poverty, and uncertainty of Bogotá and moving to Houston, where “their ears took in English, English, all the time English, and if they heard Spanish, it was with no accent like their own.” After overstaying their visas, they have two more kids including Talia, the youngest, and move to various cities. Talia breaks out of a reformatory for girls in Colombia with a single purpose: to reunite with her family in the U.S. Engel ( The Veins of the Ocean) delivers an outstanding novel of migration and the Colombian diaspora.
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