Cocktail Horror

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.