By now, you may have reached the end of the June California Book Club selection, Solito, Javier Zamora’s memoir of traveling 3,000 miles from El Salvador to Northern California to unite with his parents, and realized the extent to which nine-year-old Zamora developed profound familial bonds with his fellow migrants, a group that dwindles over the course of the book, until there are only four of them. They start as strangers, but the ones who remain by book’s end help Zamora survive a series of terrifying and dangerous moments.
When they make it to Tucson, Arizona, there is a sense of triumph, but Zamora’s child self is also startled to realize that he is going one way, to San Rafael, where his parents live, while the travelers who cared for him for the past weeks will go elsewhere. He says, “I didn’t realize we were going to opposite sides of the country. I thought they were gonna be near. Close. We’re The Four. I want them to meet my parents. To tell Mom how good I’ve been.… I don’t want to be separated from my second family.”
A similar intensity around unexpected relationships permeates Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s books. We’re delighted to welcome her as a special guest to the California Book Club to discuss Solito. Contreras, like Zamora, writes with profound emotion from an innocent child’s perspective about harm, migration, and the bonds of family. In Contreras’s debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, a girl who lives in a gated community in Colombia becomes friends with a maid who is recruited to arrange her kidnapping. The novel was inspired by real-life events—when Contreras was 10, during the violent era of drug lord Pablo Escobar in Colombia, her father was kidnapped but had the good fortune to be released because he had previously known his kidnapper, and Contreras’s mother was threatened with the kidnapping of her daughters. The novel received a silver medal for First Work of Fiction from the California Book Awards.
Contreras’s own memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, tells of the author’s temporary amnesia after an accident, which prompts reflections on her grandfather’s work as a curandero (shaman) and her mother’s earlier, parallel experience of amnesia. Contreras writes, “Guerrilla and drug violence drove my family and me from Colombia in 1998, when I was fourteen. This bred a waste of assimilation in my sister and me.” Like Zamora and his family, Contreras and hers left their country and remade their lives in the United States, and you can feel a similar perspective on the sense of loss felt in migration. She explains, “We didn’t know at the time that the safety we sought had a cost. We didn’t know that this cost would be a gulf—that we would stand before this gulf over and over again and mourn all we’d lost.” The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.
We hope you’ll join us in what is sure to be a phenomenal event this Thursday. If you’ve finished Solito, you might consider picking up either of Contreras’s excellent, deeply resonant books and Zamora’s poetry collection, Unaccompanied, which is a linguistically attentive look at borderland politics, immigration, and Zamora’s birth country.•
Join us on June 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Zamora will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and Contreras to discuss Solito. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
ZAMORA’S POETIC VISION
California Book Club host John Freeman connects the depictions of human tenderness in Zamora’s debut poetry collection, Unaccompanied, to his memoir, Solito. —Alta
“SOLITO” PLAYLIST
Read Alta Journal assistant editor Elizabeth Casillas’s piece on the music in Zamora’s memoir. —Alta
MEN’S SECRETS
Read journalist Carolina A. Miranda’s review of Alex Espinoza’s third novel, The Sons of El Rey, which explores the “complicated relationships between fathers and sons” and covers “half a century and two nations.” —Alta
“FUNKY TABLEAU”
Alta contributor and book critic Bethanne Patrick writes about visiting eccentric speculative fiction author Harlan Ellison’s house in Los Angeles with his writer-producer friend J. Michael Straczynski, who pushed for the reissue of Ellison’s novels and is petitioning the city to grant landmark status to Ellison Wonderland. —Los Angeles Times
LAUNCH PARTY
Alta contributor Michelle Cruz Gonzales will be in conversation with author Tomas Moniz about his new novel, All Friends Are Necessary, at Green Apple Books on the Park tonight at 7 p.m. Pacific. —Green Apple Books
TRUE TO YOUR ART
Director Susan Seidelman’s new memoir, Desperately Seeking Something, “traces the arc of American film over the last 45 years as refracted through Seidelman’s singular career.” —Los Angeles Times
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