
One Brilliant Flame by Joy Castro Reviewed by Lorraine M. López
One Brilliant Flame by Joy Castro
Book Review by Lorraine M. López
Published by Lake Union Publishing
Genre: Novel
Release Date: January 3, 2023
Page count: 352 pages
ISBN: 978-1542038041
“The anthologies don’t mention us,” claims Joy Castro in an essay titled “Island of Bones.” In so doing, she observes the tendency for collections of literature, and textbooks, to omit reference to immigration from Cuba to North America that occurred before 1959. The Cuban Revolution looms large in our national imaginary, its early refugees embraced as evidence of a failed socialist experiment. Fixation on exodus catalyzed by Fidel Castro’s takeover reinforces “land of the free” rhetoric that configures the U.S. as a safe harbor from communism. But such focus overlooks Cuban immigrants who arrived in this country in the late 1800s, as the island-nation toggled between struggling for independence from Spain and resisting absorption into the United States. Distinct from the dispossessed bourgeoisie fleeing communism, the first Cuban immigrants spanned a full spectrum in terms of socioeconomic status, race, and occupation. They were entrepreneurs, sailors, escaped slaves, speculators, domestics, merchants, sex-workers, artists, artisans, and more. In the 19th century, any Cuban who had access to a vessel with ninety-four miles of seaworthiness could paddle out to start life anew in Cayo Hueso, the “island of bones,” later called Key West. For the secondary wave of immigrants—largely a homogenous group of well-resourced white people—and their consolidated narrative of divestiture to overshadow their predecessors and drown out a richly varied aggregation of voices seems a crime of intellectual, historical, and cultural negligence.
To counter such erasure, Joy Castro’s novel, One Brilliant Flame presents a range of characters, depicting many among the first to relocate to Key West from Cuba. Re-inscribing forgotten figures expands and amends the written account in a crucial way. And how better to capture this panoply of voices than Rashomon-style, with a multiplicity of perspectives? But unlike the Kurosawa classic that tells and retells a single incident from different points of view to achieve parallax that is both deeply comprehensive and confounding, Castro’s novel handles point-of-view like a baton passed in a relay—from character to character, with some overlap—advancing the plot as speakers take turns to reveal events that preceded a critical episode in the island’s history. In each short chapter, a different character claims the spotlight to deliver first-person testimony, as if in response to an unseen interlocutor’s questions: Who are you? What happened? What did you do? Why?
Chapter titles announce their narrators by name—Zenaida, Sofia, Chaveta, Libano, Feliciano, Maceo, and Julieta—and open by grounding the reader in the speaker’s circumstances, gracefully world-building to depict Key West in the late 1800s, with Zenaida, a wordsmith, waxing most lyrically:
I loved the crowded marketplace: all the bright marquees fluttering over booths, the chattering
throng of housewives and servants, the great stacks of mangoes and avocados ripening in the sun,
whole forests of pineapples, vast tubs of coconuts and guavas, fat bulbs of garlic, onions galore,
pyramids of yams and potatoes…
As Zenaida, Sofia, and Chaveta soliloquize with greatest frequency, the novel further demonstrates commitment to untold stories in presenting female narratives from a time of archival whispering, when records almost entirely reflect male perspectives. The three main narrators are vividly drawn young women, connected to one another by acquaintanceship. Despite their repressive historical context, these characters are deftly portrayed as self-determined individuals in a way that is both astonishing and convincing. Notwithstanding such singularity, each narrating protagonist represents a particular milieu in Key West society of 1886.
With her radical journalist father and boardinghouse-running mother, biracial Zenaida embodies self-made individualists who managed upward mobility by balancing talent and intellect with pragmatism and hard work. Observant and intuitive, Zenaida leans into a life of the mind, steadfastly steering toward a career as an educator and writer. By contrast, the materialistic Sofia exemplifies the nouveau riche, Key West’s burgeoning upper class. Sofia’s father owns sugar mills, along with the cigar factory that employs many of the Island’s inhabitants, and speculates on property investment in Tampa. Isolated by privilege, Sofia relieves her indolence by inflicting cruelty on others, once needling—quite literally—a server. “Its sharp tip came to rest lightly upon his flesh and then pressed in, just a little. The cafetero gasped. A red pearl of blood welled… and a strange delicious heat tugged low in my belly.” Though she dreams of leaving Key West to open a teashop in New York, Sofia applies her agency to acts of aggression and does little to realize her ambition.
Instead Chaveta, despite living in an impoverished and oppressive household, proves the most dynamic of the three main characters. A cigar-roller whose wages subsidize her parents and siblings, Chaveta has the autonomy, intelligence, and inner strength that render her beholden to no one. Grateful that employment spares her from her mother’s fate, Chaveta notes, “One good thing about working in the factory was not caring for my little brothers and sisters all day. In my mother’s face, my mother’s body, loomed a weak, disheveled echo of my own.” Her sobriquet—chaveta—references the crescent-shaped blade used by cigar-rollers to cut tobacco leaves, an apt moniker for one determined to carve a life for herself that resists subjugation.
Peripheral figures similarly emerge to provide testimony throughout the novel, and effecting a certain symmetry, a trio of such speakers are men: Líbano, a coffee-bearer who serves cigar-rollers at their workbenches; Feliciano, a lector who reads newspapers, novels, and poetry aloud to workers in the cigar factory; and Maceo, a soldier known for his heroism in fighting to liberate Cuba from Spain. The three male narrators appear infrequently, and their voices betray compromised efficacy and self-delusion, establishing the unreliability that imbues monologue with drama. Líbano’s prolific memory for customer orders ought to render his observations most trustworthy, but as he endures Sofia’s torments, readers apprehend tensions building within him, antipathy that belies his objectivity. Feliciano, a Galician who nevertheless supports Cuban independence, bears psychic scars of trauma, engendering insecurity that redacts his outlook and corrupts his version of events. Lastly, Maceo delivers the most fraught deposition, a farrago of denial and deception befitting his occupation as a soldier, and a spy.
Through this series of short soliloquys, the plot unfolds, recounting events that culminate in the Great Fire of 1886, the largest conflagration in Key West history. Ignited in a cafe near the San Carlos Institute, a Cuban cultural center, the blaze burned for twelve hours, destroying most of the city’s commercial district, costing seven lives and over a million dollars in property damage. Though the cause of the fire remains unknown to this day, many suspect arson at the behest of the Spanish empire to curtail support for Cuban independence from prosperous emigres in Key West. Despite its title, One Brilliant Flame, with its many voices, posits a multiplicity of sparks, contributing factors—both personal and systemic. Even as it assigns agency and voice to those who are limited in power and speculates on a single actor with particular and justifiable motives, the novel—a triumph of storytelling—holds many players accountable, as each witness produces a jigsaw piece of guilty knowledge to snap into place before the full picture can shimmer into view.
Joy Castro is the award-winning author of Flight Risk, a finalist for a 2022 International Thriller Award; the post-Katrina New Orleans literary thrillers Hell or High Water, which received the Nebraska Book Award, and Nearer Home, which have been published in France by Gallimard’s historic Série Noire; the story collection How Winter Began; the memoir The Truth Book; and the essay collection Island of Bones, which received the International Latino Book Award. She is also editor of the craft anthology Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family and the founding series editor of Machete, a series in innovative literary nonfiction at The Ohio State University Press. She served as the guest judge of CRAFT‘s first Creative Nonfiction Award, and her work has appeared in venues including Ploughshares, The Brooklyn Rail, Senses of Cinema, Salon, Gulf Coast, Brevity, Afro-Hispanic Review, Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine. A former Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University, she is currently the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies (Latinx Studies) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she directs the Institute for Ethnic Studies.
Lorraine M. López has written seven books of fiction and edited three essay collections. Her first book, Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories won the inaugural Miguel Marmól Prize for Fiction, and her second book, Call Me Henri was awarded the Paterson Prize for Young Adult Literature. López’s short-story collection, Homicide Survivors Picnic was a Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize in Fiction in 2010 and awarded the Texas League of Writers Award. Postcards from the Gerund State and Other Stories, the author’s most recent book, was released in 2019.
19 April 2023
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