Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Back to Blood

Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe  704 pp.

Miami is a melting pot of immigrants. A large part of the population is Cuban and the Cuban community is the main focus of this novel. Police Officer Nestor Camacho has become a pariah to his family and his Cuban neighborhood. Nestor is called a traitor for, in attempting to save the life of a Cuban trying to enter the country and preventing him from setting foot on land. Then Nestor has to face his superiors for doing an "unapproved" interview with the press following the incident. To compound things further, Nestor's girlfriend Magdalena dumps him for her boss, a psychiatrist who treats pornography addiction. Add in Russian millionaires, Jewish New Yorker senior citizens. an art forger, and a Haitian French professor who insists he and his kids are French and not Haitian and you have a jumbled mix of characters. The storylines of the characters cross, merge, and mingle in a plethora of ways that may or may not be resolved by the end of the book. I listened to the audio version with excellent narration by Lou Diamond Phillips. But in spite of the excellent performance by Phillips, the book was just so-so and way too long.

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