Cocktail Horror

On Alexander Sorondo’s ‘Cubafruit’

Three Women Perched on a Bar in Havana, Cuba, c. 1950, Photograph, Getty Images

One mark of a great motif is its ability to linger whether you understand it or not. I did not understand why every character in Alexander Sorondo’s debut novel Cubafruit needed to be drinking cubafruit in every scene, but after about 50 pages, I wanted to drink some myself. This presented a difficulty: Neither the drink nor the plant it’s made from exists outside of the novel. Like those Harry Potter fans in line for butterbeer lattes at Books-A-Million, I too wanted to taste the fictional world I was inhabiting. I mixed two parts guava juice with one part Cointreau, one part reposado, one part rum, two shakes of Peychaud’s bitters, and a squeeze of lime. Peychaud’s bitters are important here, as much of Cubafruit’s charm lies in the melding of ingredients that shouldn’t quite go together but do. Here we have a story about genocide told with the wide scope and electric pace of Don Winslow’s The Power of the Dog, the campy humor and paranoia of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the elusive history of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, sprinklings of late Cormac McCarthy’s terse baritone prose, and a healthy dose of magical realism. Though this is much lighter fare than its most apparent influences, Sorondo is no slouch. He weaves a wide narrative with striking, often disturbing images that imprint the mind — perhaps longer than one would prefer.

Cubafruit begins in 1997 with a genocide. In a few pages, we see Vice President Obregon Themus land on the Caribbean nation of San Mara, a minister and war criminal named Omar Basto shout through a megaphone for the natives (known as Taija) to leave their homes, and his followers murder a young Taija girl’s parents. In the present day, a man referred to only as “the biographer” is finishing his fourth and final volume on Themus. He’s due to appear live on a talk show in a few hours to discuss his work, as well as the recent sightings of Basto, thought long-dead. As he’s walking through the park, he gets a phone call: It’s that Taija girl from the prologue, Annaliet. She has a sniper rifle on him and a few demands. He’s to stay on the line until he gets the call from the show. Then he’s to loop her in and let her speak. She’s going to correct his history about Themus, Basto, and the genocide on a live radio broadcast.

That is the central plot as advertised, yet it takes up roughly a tenth of the novel’s 428 pages. The present day exchanges between Annaliet and the biographer as they wait for him to receive the phone call serve as brief interludes between much larger sections of San Mara’s history. First we learn of Omar Basto’s origins, from his beginnings as a street kid roughing up business owners to his rise as a religious and political leader, gaining his following by stirring up antipathy toward President Bunuel and the Taija, whom he provides aid. From there, we get a glimpse of Annaliet’s early days in the Taija resistance as she’s chosen for various assassinations not so much for being a great shot as for her ability to disappear. The leader of this resistance is Alma, who is not above killing large numbers of civilians as a strategic move against Basto. There’s about as many different perspectives here as in As I Lay Dying. There are minor characters who only appear for single chapters, such as a fisherman who hunts the island’s most dangerous fish, a most sought-after delicacy, and whose stories are self-contained and there to highlight the character of San Mara itself. Others, like Jose Luis Verdano, Basto’s brutal right-hand man, and Pavel Bender, a hapless CIA agent looking to cash in on San Mara’s turmoil, seem like they would be minor characters but end up taking more page space than the protagonists. This is — perhaps intentionally — ironic, given Annaliet’s conceit that the biographer spends too much time talking about the villains of history rather than the victims. Cubafruit itself spends more time with its villains, but all for the better. Such sinister digressions as Pavel sending a street kid on a pre-botched assassination attempt, Jose escaping an encounter with the island’s most dangerous fish after a shootout, and the fermenting of the titular cubafruit for alcoholic consumption are where the novel shines best.

It often seems that Cubafruit might dance a little too heedlessly with its branching storylines and collapse under its own weight, but miraculously, it doesn’t. The lucid, muscular prose and almost surgical pacing give every subplot a propulsive urgency and every character an essential thread in an increasingly prodigious tapestry. No single digression feels like time wasted. No character is fully developed, but they don’t need to be. Cubafruit isn’t a series of portraits but a mosaic. The result is more than 400 pages with scarcely a dull moment.

Positively none of this should work. That so little time is spent on the central plot is alone the death blow of any thriller. Add to that the hardboiled, ironic, and nihilistically gonzo tone of what is fundamentally a tale about genocide. And yet, the tone never makes its underlying story unserious. It only amplifies the grotesque. In one of the most deranged and memorable sequences, Jose Luis Verdano is sailing from Mexico to a foreign jungle with a crew of killers on a horrifically doomed voyage. They’ve all been adopted into a cult-like militia where they had to train by collectively pulling trees from their roots with their bare hands, along with the limbs of any recruit who failed the task. They were shown (clearly doctored) documentary-like reels of “demonic” and “barbarous” natives in the jungle and are now on their way to slaughter “the enemy.” By this point, the motif of drinking cubafruit becomes clear. Just replace cubafruit with Kool-Aid.

Sea life begins predictably for this band of brutes, full of drinking, sodomy, masturbation, and merriment. They are disturbed by a smell below deck and the gnawing of unseen rats that come out at night. Eventually, bodies start turning up one by one, butchered in horrific ways, a new corpse every night:

They mount their hammocks or, in a couple cases, say Fuck the Hammocks and sit on the floor with their backs against the wall. Try to stay awake. They can’t tell if they’re sleeping. They hear noises. Ocean rats giggle and cavort. Hind-leggéd. Twirling their whiskers like villains. Pulling them taut and plucking evil diddies.

In the morning there’s another body. Chomped and stabbed.

They clean the floor. They wrap the body. They say nothing. They drop it into the ocean and return to their chores.

Postures dip. The sky is gray. Soldiers cock their ears toward the sounds in their minds. The wash and crush of the ocean gets bent into sentences, Mother Nature talking, and dolphins leap up out of the foamy black chop and arc in the air and jackknife down except sometimes they leap up and FREEZE and levitate and lock eyes with sleepless sailors to say, Eee-eee-eee! You’re gonna die here! Eee-eee! then jackknife down, giggling.

Without spoiling too much of this sequence, the crew sinks further and further into depravity while, “The rats come out from the walls wearing top hats and monocles and popping their canes.” Though perhaps puerile, the anthropomorphic humor effectively shows humanity racing to the bottom of the ladder of species. The ship could be a microcosm for the 20th century, Latin America, or civilization in general. It’s an outrageous and wholly original use of magical realism that Sorondo has made his own.

To say that I wished this book were longer would be a half-compliment. Such praise as “the pages fly by” is hardly meaningful for a book where single-line paragraphs can make up half a page. But it should have been slightly longer, its central theme a little more developed. The underlying question of “Who owns history: the oppressor or the oppressed?” is brought up often in the beginning, usually by Annaliet to the biographer as she has him in her crosshairs. The biographer is an enigmatic character whose interiority we are given little access to, as he rarely speaks up for himself. His laconic passivity results in paradoxically memorable lines. It also results in an underbaked dialectic in which he is frequently just the recipient of a lecture. These scenes often feel like they’re veering toward the didactic, but Sorondo avoids this by undercutting each character in subtle ways.

Annaliet, for instance, is introduced as a ruthless assassin who dispenses with anyone impeding her objective. It quickly becomes clear, however, that despite her 20-odd years as a member of the Taija resistance, she is out of her depth with this mission and prioritizes her escape over its success. She makes frequent inept decisions like warning the biographer not to let the cops arrest a knife-wielding homeless man attacking a barista, fearing that if there’s an arrest, it might draw attention and blow up her spot. But all that ends up doing is causing a bigger uproar in the crowd, making it more difficult for the biographer to stay on the line. Nor is Annaliet depicted as any kind of moral authority. Neither she nor the rest of the Taija resistance pushes back on their leader’s plans to blow up innocent civilians; having walked their own Trail of Tears and watched their loved ones slaughtered, they spend the rest of their days with an unquenchable bloodlust. When they need a truck, they don’t just steal one — they steal it while stuffing the owner’s mouth with gravel, cuffing him to the tow hitch, and driving off while his arms get ripped from their sockets. Annaliet herself once killed the dogs of her would-be assassination target, nearly botching the hit itself doing so, all because she wanted the target to “see his loved ones die.”

The never-ending chaos helps drive the narrative forward but occasionally bungles it as well. What would have been an outstanding scene of Annaliet finally connecting to the radio show when cops show up at her door looking for her, which forces her to stay quiet, is pushed over the top when the random homeless man starts attacking citizens in the courtyard. The quiet tension in Annaliet’s hotel room is undercut by the knife-wielder’s fight with the barista and various pedestrians. It’s a pointless contrivance that does nothing but add random chaos to an already tense scene, providing Annaliet with a deus ex machina she wouldn’t have needed if she were a little more competent. This, along with so much of the central mystery going unanswered, makes the thriller components the weakest of the novel. An ironic twist prevents us from hearing the “correction” of the biographer’s history that Annaliet so ominously promises in the beginning, and the central mystery of Omar Basto’s reappearance goes unanswered. This feels unjustified, given the omniscient position of the narration. It would be one thing if the reader had access to Omar's life only through the limited perspectives of other characters, but we get a front row seat to Omar’s interiority right up until the point it no longer serves the novel. The ambiguity, however, is not just a superficial postmodern evasion, but inculcates the novel’s central irony: Humans will commit mass murder to be in control of history, but history ends up eluding them all the same. Or, as the biographer puts it, “I swear, from the way he tells it? His own biography? — it’s like none of it’s ever about him.” And yet, this inscrutability of history might have been more pronounced if we had gotten the part of Annaliet’s story that contradicts the biographer’s, or anything at all to obfuscate or recontextualize the events we witness throughout. Instead, we have a form that doesn’t quite fit the novel’s logic.

And now to settle my own evasions: The Cubafruit-inspired cocktail was okay, it really didn’t need the bitters, and to mix tequila with rum is to forgo morals and manners. As for the novel itself, it can neither fully commit to the expectations of a thriller nor fully grapple with its weightier themes, but it still manages to get its characters tangled in the machinery of history, both its making and telling, with such absurdity and animation throughout, that I can only hope this first effort by Sorondo will not be his last. I see nothing short of greatness in his oeuvre, given a couple more tries.

Adam Pearson lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he writes fiction and the Substack newsletter The Pensive Pejorative.