Papi
A Novel
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
“Papi’s there, around any corner,” says the eight-year-old girl at the heart of Papi. “But you can’t sit down and wait for him cuz that’s a longer and more painful death.” Living in Santo Domingo, she waits for her father to come back from the United States and lavish her with the glorious rewards of his fame and fortune—shiny new cars and polo shirts, gold chains and Nikes. But when Papi does come back, he turns out to be more “like Jason, the guy from Friday the 13th,” than a prince. Papi is a drug dealer, a man who is clearly unreliable and dangerous but nevertheless makes his daughter feel powerful and wholly, terrifyingly alive.
Drawing on her memories of a childhood split between Santo Domingo and visits with her father amid the luxuries of the United States, Rita Indiana mixes satire with a child’s imagination, horror with science fiction, in a swirling tale of a daughter’s love, the lure of crime and machismo, and the violence of the adult world. Expertly translated into English for the first time by Achy Obejas, who renders the rhythmic lyricism of Indiana’s Dominican Spanish in language that propels the book forward with the relentless beat of a merengue, Papi is furious, musical, and full of wit—a passionate, overwhelming, and very human explosion of artistic virtuosity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Indiana's genre-defying novel, her first translated into English, captures the intensity of a growing up with a drug lord for a father. Told from the perspective of an unnamed 8-year-old girl whose penchant for hyperbole betrays a tenuous grasp on reality, Indiana pulls from her own childhood split between Santo Domingo and the U.S. to highlight the hallucinatory bizarrity of being the daughter of Papi, a drug dealer whose enigmatic stature the young narrator cloaks in a veneer of pop culture references and consumerist excess. Papi showers the narrator with toys and trips until a switchblade in the tire of his Mercedes signals his fall from the unspecified drug trade. The novel dives heavily into surreal aspects of her childhood such as the narrator and Papi shooting ducks from a car doing doughnuts at 200 miles per hour while taking the occasional breath to ground itself with more concrete details of life growing up in the Dominican Republic. As Papi goes deeper into crime and drugs, Indiana matches her lively sentences to the emotional state of the narrator, including more and more frenetic sequences of fantasy that unfold alongside rising emotional trauma. The prose reverberates with energy; Indiana who is a musician as well as a writer has a keen ear, and Obejas brilliantly transfigures her prosody into English. Deeply felt and formally inventive, Indiana's novel crackles with intensity and oddity.
