The California Chronicle has posted a list of the best books set in Florida. The list—which contains wonderful books like Zora Neale Hurston’s My Eyes Were Watching God, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, and Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, among others—also includes four books that link the Miami setting with the Caribbean. “What constitutes a classic Florida book?” the Chronicle asks, “An author’s passion for sabal palms, hurricane warnings, mildew, mojitos and the ability to pluck nuggets of truth from our rich and sometimes ugly history? A wicked sense of humor about the subtropical oddities — flying cucarachas, copulating iguanas, six-toed cats, swamp-eating developers — skittering through our everyday lives? We like to think that the theme that sets true South Florida literary classics apart from books spawned elsewhere is their unerring sense of the place and the people who constitute Florida’s bizarre mixture of paradise and hell. “
Featured on the list are Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying and Ana Menéndez’s In Cuba I was a German Shepherd, plus two U. S> classics linked to the Caribbean region, Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Russell Banks’ The Continental Drift. Here’s what the article had to say about them:
Brother, I’m Dying, Edwidge Danticat: The immigrant’s story is Florida’s story, and Danticat reveals its ugly side. This sobering memoir about her father and her uncle, brothers separated for 30 years, winds through two places deeply connected to South Florida: New York and Haiti. Danticat lived in Haiti with her uncle, a minister, when her parents emigrated to the United States; later she joined them in New York. Worried about increasing violence at home, her uncle eventually fled to Miami, where he was promptly imprisoned by Homeland Security and, even as his niece tried to navigate a bureaucratic hell and free him, fell ill and died at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd, Ana Menendez. All the stories in the debut collection evoke longing and discontent. But none is so powerfully melancholic as the title story, in which four men gather in Little Havana to play dominoes, tell jokes and dream of a homeland lost to them forever.
To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemingway: It will never be mistaken for Papa’s best work (we are fond of The Sun Also Rises, although impassioned arguments can and will be made for The Old Man and the Sea). But fishing boat captain Harry Morgan, desperate in the heart of the Great Depression, makes a fateful decision to smuggle contraband from Cuba to Florida. Confused? That’s because you’re thinking of the Bogart/Bacall film, which had almost nothing but its title in common with Hemingway’s novel.
Continental Drift, Russell Banks: Through the eyes of an unlucky blue-collar worker from New Hampshire and an impoverished Haitian immigrant, Florida — Miami in particular — shines like a welcoming beacon. No cold winters or poverty or terror in this land of plenty, they think, and make their separate hazardous journeys. And then they learn the truth. The novel, perhaps Banks’ best, comes to its shattering conclusion in Little Haiti.
For the others on the list go to http://www.californiachronicle.com/articles/yb/134454531
