cover image A Perfect Silence

A Perfect Silence

Alba Ambert. Arte Publico Press, $19.95 (199pp) ISBN 978-1-55885-125-2

Poet and short-story writer Ambert's first novel chronicles the harrowing tale of a young woman pulled unwillingly through life in New York's South Bronx. Blanca battles poverty, abuse and despair, but her toughest confrontation is with her own memories. ``The memory is not clear, but reeks of an atavistic sadness, passive for centuries,'' she muses. ``Atavistic sadness'' might suggest the novel is a statement on the Puerto Rican people, in which case it might have resonated. But the events of one young woman's life are doled out relentlessly to the reader like so many strikes of a hammer. The novel begins with Blanca's most recent suicide attempt-her way of fighting the persistent oppression of recollection. Yet, although the story is written partly in the first person and recounts many of Blanca's abysmal experiences, it circles around reflection without defining the core of the problem. One feels that the author is trying hard but unsuccessfully to expose a devastating truth in these pages, but the suffocating atmosphere of this relentlessly depressing story traps the reader inside Blanca's ``dark pain'' without catharsis or surcease. (Mar.)