The Apartment

April 24, 2023
Menéndez (Adios, Happy Homeland!) explores the lives of a Miami apartment’s tenants over 70 years in her ambitious if diffuse latest. In 1942, a hopeful new bride from San Antonio moves into 2B at the Helena, where her dreams of marital bliss are quashed by wartime tensions and abuse from her Army major husband. Menéndez then jumps to 1963, when Eugenio, a Cuban classical pianist reduced to playing weddings and nursing home gigs, has lived in 2B for the past 11 years. Eugenio contemplates his love of music after he hears about the death of a great Cuban composer. In 1972, a Vietnam War vet lives there among termite-eaten furniture left from previous tenants, his “head on fire” from memories of combat. And in 2010, 40-year-old Pilar packs up the place to move back in with her parents, unable to afford the spiking rent and calling herself a “victim of the financial crisis.” Taking Pilar’s place is a young Cuban refugee, whose fate impacts other tenants in surprising ways. A late foray into magical realism feels a bit hackneyed, and some of the time periods are more evocatively described than others. Still, Menéndez’s nesting-doll narrative serves as a thoughtful meditation on the transient nature of home. Despite its flaws, this is worth a look.

Starred review from May 1, 2023
The quiet, remarkable lives of the tenants in a South Miami Beach apartment permeate this haunting new novel by esteemed fiction writer and journalist Men�ndez. From the opening scene of a nameless woman on the shores of pre-colonial Florida, the reader is addressed and invited to be a witness to the transformation of a unique place over a period of 70 years. Picking up again after the construction of an apartment building in 1942, Men�ndez introduces the captivating tenants of apartment 2B, who inhabit a vividly described, mutable city. An air force officer and his young bride are the first to move in, just as the country is plunged into a devastating war. Among the other residents are a concert pianist from Cuba, a Vietnam war veteran, a politically exiled couple, a couple who married for a green card, the husband's lover, and refugees from different parts of the world. Interspersed are interpolations of an omniscient perspective, one that exists outside of time, lending an aura of magical realism.The novel explores many facets of loneliness and isolation and the feeling of being othered and far from home, and it illustrates the often life-saving importance of community. Give to fans of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs (2022), by Sidik Fofana.

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Starred review from June 1, 2023
One apartment on Miami Beach becomes a microcosm of seven decades of ordinary, extraordinary lives. Apartment 2B in an art deco building called the Helena on South Miami Beach serves as setting for all of the chapters of this moving, lyrical novel in short stories. New in 1942, it first houses a young military couple from Texas: Sophie and Jack Appleton. She's giddy to find herself in such a glamorous town, but he's preoccupied with the war, a war that will soon enough come home to them. In 1963, an aging Cuban concert pianist named Eugenio Francisco Montes Behar grieves for a lost love and finds the man's spirit in music. In 1972, the tenant is Sandman, a refugee in his own country, a divorced Vietnam vet with PTSD who's badly undone by an anti-war march, then saved by hatchling sea turtles. In 1982, Isabel is a lovely 18-year-old Marielita disappointed in South Beach at the nadir of its decay but dazzled by the older painter who installs her in the apartment first as muse, then as lover. In 2002, married couple Maribel Rodriguez and Ignacio Salas live there with his girlfriend, Beatrice Dumonts--a complicated threesome created not by love or desire but by immigration law. In 2010, Pilar, a Cuban American journalist, is packing to leave 2B (now a condo) after she loses her job and faces the bitter reality of moving back in with her parents at age 40. Pilar rents her condo to a young man named Lenin Garc�a, another Cuban refugee, who soon dies. The last and longest section, set in 2012, weaves Lenin's heartbreaking story together with that of Lana, another immigrant who's not who she seems to be. She tries to isolate herself but becomes engulfed in all of the extraordinary stories that haunt the Helena, including those of the living. Vividly drawn characters and finely crafted prose enhance these interwoven tales. In Apartment 2B, the walls do talk, and their tales reveal their tenants' minds and hearts.

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