cover image Hot Soles in Harlem

Hot Soles in Harlem

Valcarcel Emilio Diaz, Emilio Diaz Valcarcel, Emilio Diaz Valcarcel. Latin American Literary Review Press, $16.95 (203pp) ISBN 978-0-935480-61-0

New York City, as seen through the eyes of recently immigrated Gerardo Sanchez, can be vibrant and desolate, clear and irrational. Gerardo leaves his child and ex-wife in Puerto Rico for a better life in Manhattan. He meets Aleluya, an intellectual militant who is enraptured and enraged by Gerardo's ignorance of most everything. Aleluya looks out for Gerardo when he can, finding the newcomer a place to stay and leading him to a lawyer and a doctor when the ceiling in his slum apartment falls on his head. There are passageways to worlds Gerardo has never imagined, filled with transvestites, artists, activists and people of many nationalities. For all Gerardo's naivete, he is a keen observer of the city's people, images, smells and accents, which he relates in a stream of highly impressionistic consciousness. Forty-second street becomes ``greasy corn-on-the-cob steakhouse turnovers pizzeria the store windows display hard core underground porn.'' The confusion generated by Valcarcel's ( Schemes in the Month of March ) relative indifference to punctuation and dramatic development is assuaged by the lucidity of the language, which often feels like poems strung together as prose. (Nov.)