Cast Away
Kase Johnstun
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Beautifully written, Cast Away puts a surprising twist on the immigrant’s story. A dual narrative consisting of two coming of age stories (one set in the 1920s and the other in the 90s), the novel explores the meeting point between home and identity.
Kase Johnstun gives distinctive voices to the protagonists—Chuy and his aunt Veronica Chavez. Veronica is the daughter of a Mexican fisherman who works hard to feed his family. She is a pretty, naïve girl who calls herself a Princesa Maya and dreams of marrying a norteamericano of the many who travel to Mérida “to get divorced.” Chuy and his older brother Hector, who have lived with their mother in Chelem, Yucatán, while their father was working in the United States, finally arrives in Salt Lake City to join him. The scene of their meeting is one my the most tender in the book. “Mis hijos,” my dad yelled in my aunt’s driveway in Rose Park. I turned and saw his arms stretched out toward the sky. (…) I had turned fourteen a week earlier, but I wasn’t too cool to run to my dad and wrap my arms around his Mexican-cowboy shirt. He squeezed me until my lungs held no more breath. Both Chuy and Veronica have left their native land hoping for a better future. Veronica follows her heart—and the man she believes is her true love, an American poet—and sixty years later, Chuy, Hector and their parents come to live together in Utah. But life in los Estados Unidos, more specifically in the heartland of Mormon Utah, turns out to be different from how they all had envisioned it.
In Rose Park, Chuy and his family stay with Veronica, now in her eighties. She isn’t the kindest tía, calling Chuy “tonto” and leaving him hungry until he addresses her in English. As the story progresses, readers find out the traumatic events that turned the young innocent “Princesa Maya” into this old lady who smacks her nephew with a rolling pin. The first violence-filled two years that Veronica spends in the United States are the answer. Without revealing too much of the plot, it can be said that Veronica is a strong woman and well-built character, loosely based of Johnstun’s maternal grandmother Della Cordova Chaves, who, in the end, inspires a quiet sympathy. She is, above all, a survivor like Johnstun’s owe grandmother who went through so much in her young life, life of a railroad man. |
The survivor theme runs throughout the novel with the background of the tv show CastAway Island that soon turns into Chuy’s favorite. Its motto “Live another day” becomes his. He’s also doing his best to survive and find meaning in his new circumstances, first in Rose Parks and later in Provo, a city described as white, quiet—and odorless, in contrast with the places he had known before:
The strangest thing about Provo was its smell, or, more accurately, its lack of smell. The smells of baking bread, frying pork, and roasting giblets wove through my neighborhood in Chelem, and those same rich aromas found us on Friday nights and Sunday mornings in Rose Park—the smell of the food in the summer air turned neighborhoods into communities, into very large families sharing in a communal love. (…) But Provo had no smell. The restaurants that surrounded our apartment were perfectly erected to match every other restaurant in the chain in every other Provo-like city in the country. And what amazed me the most was that although we lived steps from the doors of the nearest chain restaurant—with its flashy sign and hostess that opened the front doors for its guests—I couldn’t smell anything.
(The food references are not accidental. La comida plays an important role in the novel. Food equals home, tortillas—corn or flour—taste like belonging, a take from the author’s life growing up in his Cordova grandparents’ home.)
Surviving in this strange, sterile environment isn’t possible without help, and the presence of friends is also a constant in the novel. For Chuy, it is German-born Hans, his best friend at school. For Veronica, it’s first Señora Chavez, the Mexican woman who sort of adopts her and tries in vain to protect her, and Claire, the kind professor who opens her home to Veronica when she needs it most.
The “myth of return” is another theme. Though for one character it is not really a myth, as Hector willingly goes back to Mexico, Chuy and Veronica found out that there is no returning for them. They must make peace with their new home, more so when life throws them together in a surprising twist. Their relationship mends, and she becomes not only Chuy’s only blood family in Utah, but his loving family as well. The rolling pin ends up as a symbol of the tortillas she makes for her nephew con amor.
With an ending both uplifting and yet tinged with sadness, Cast Away is the kind of story whose characters, flawed and believable, stay with the reader long after closing the last page of the book. The book shows the positive effects immigrants bring to los Estados Unidos. It’s a story about dreamers.
Surviving in this strange, sterile environment isn’t possible without help, and the presence of friends is also a constant in the novel. For Chuy, it is German-born Hans, his best friend at school. For Veronica, it’s first Señora Chavez, the Mexican woman who sort of adopts her and tries in vain to protect her, and Claire, the kind professor who opens her home to Veronica when she needs it most.
The “myth of return” is another theme. Though for one character it is not really a myth, as Hector willingly goes back to Mexico, Chuy and Veronica found out that there is no returning for them. They must make peace with their new home, more so when life throws them together in a surprising twist. Their relationship mends, and she becomes not only Chuy’s only blood family in Utah, but his loving family as well. The rolling pin ends up as a symbol of the tortillas she makes for her nephew con amor.
With an ending both uplifting and yet tinged with sadness, Cast Away is the kind of story whose characters, flawed and believable, stay with the reader long after closing the last page of the book. The book shows the positive effects immigrants bring to los Estados Unidos. It’s a story about dreamers.
Kase Johnstun lives and writes in Ogden, Utah. He is the manager for the Utah Center for the Book and Utah’s Affiliate to the Library of Congress. Along with his forthcoming novel Cast Away, he is the author of the award-winning novel Let the Wild Grasses Grow and the award-winning memoir Beyond the Grip of Craniosynostosis. He comes from a long history of Cordovas and Chavezes from the southwest, and his published essays that navigate the uncompromising questions of what it means to be half Hispanic/Latino and a half descendant of Mormon pioneers have been published in LatinX Lit Mag, Label Me Latino/a, Under the Gum Tree, and many other places.
Castaway is a publication by Torrey House Press.
Castaway is a publication by Torrey House Press.
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