Infinite Country(48)

Our father is doing handiwork and repairs for a friend of our mother’s bosses. When he’s not at his new job, just as my mother and sister have done, and my brother with the pages he handed over, our father has begun to tell me the story of him, of how our family came to be, which I’ve tried to write here, though the stories keep coming, so I know the book of our lives will continue to grow with truth and time.

It’s not that the sum of these pages can tell everything about us. There are things we will never share with one another, that will remain unnamed or unspoken. Things I save for private journals, like how I wonder if I will ever find the kind of love I want, a love that at least at its inception resembles what our parents felt when they discovered each other and trusted each other enough to travel to a new world together. There are innumerable joys left out of these pages. Sorrows too. A life rendered will always be incomplete.

Soon after our father arrived we went to a party in our old neighborhood and introduced him to our friends from the basement days. When a cumbia came on, he asked our mother to dance, and we watched our parents sway, finding each other’s rhythm as if they’d never fallen out of step, as if the past fifteen years were only a dance interrupted waiting for the next song to play. I wondered about the matrix of separation and dislocation, our years bound to the phantom pain of a lost homeland, because now that we are together again that particular hurt and sensation that something is missing has faded. And maybe there is no nation or citizenry; they’re just territories mapped in place of family, in place of love, the infinite country.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


To the families who see aspects of their experiences reflected in these pages: You are my heroes. I wrote this book for you.

To victims and survivors of every kind of violence, and to the displaced and the disappeared: I carry you in my heart.

My thanks to Ayesha Pande, agent extraordinaire, and the Pande Literary team; to the always visionary Lauren Wein; Amy Guay, Meredith Vilarello, Alexandra Primiani, Morgan Hoit, Jessica Chin, Alison Forner, and everyone at Avid Reader Press and Simon & Schuster for your work on this book and for such a warm welcome.

My thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for their generous support of my research and writing of this novel; to Viet Thanh Nguyen and Ploughshares for publishing an early excerpt; to my colleagues and students at the University of Miami, especially M. Evelina Galang and Chantel Acevedo; and to the dear friends who’ve encouraged me along the way.

My gratitude to my family in the United States and Colombia; to my nieces, the youngest Engel writers; to my husband, John Henry, for so much love and laughter; to S, G, and M, my adored companions.

Above all, I thank my mother and father for their love, their stories, and for holding on to each other no matter what.





Infinite Country

Patricia Engel

This reading group guide for Infinite Country includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Patricia Engel. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.





Introduction


At the dawn of the new millennium, Colombia is a country devastated by half a century of violence. Only teenagers, Elena and Mauro fall in love against a backdrop of paramilitary and guerilla warfare. A few years later, brutalities continue to ravage their homeland, but the couple now has a young daughter to protect. Their economic prospects grim, they bargain on the American Dream and travel to Houston to send wages back to Elena’s mother, all the while weighing whether to risk overstaying their visas or to return to Bogotá. The decision to ignore their exit dates plunges the expanding family into the precariousness of undocumented status, the threat of discovery menacing a life already strained with struggle. When deportation forces Mauro back to Colombia, Elena sends infant Talia on a plane back to her daughter’s grandmother, splintering the family into two worlds with no certain hope of reunion. Encompassing continents and generations, Infinite Country knits together the accounts of five family members as they struggle to keep themselves whole in the face of the hostile landscapes and forces that threaten to drive them apart.





Topics & Questions for Discussion


      Infinite Country begins with Talia’s restraint of a prison school nun, her time at the correctional facility a punishment for committing an even more viscerally violent attack. Think about Talia’s decision to throw hot oil on the man who killed the cat and how this choice surfaces at various points. Reflect also on the sentence, “Talia considered how people who do horrible things can be victims, and how victims can be people who do horrible things.” What role does moral ambivalence play in the novel?

   For Mauro and Elena’s family of five, the concept of “home” is a fluid one, distinct to each character and dependent on time and place. Choose a character and chart their relationship to Colombia and to the United States. Does it change, and if so, what affects this shift?

   Although the settings of Infinite Country are primarily urban, Engel writes of lush Colombian landscapes brimming with beasts and allegories, stories in which Mauro finds a particular sense of pride. How do descriptions of North American cities compare, and what emotions can be gleaned from both kinds of imagery?