cover image Stowaway

Stowaway

Carol Cordoba. Arte Publico Press, $19.95 (284pp) ISBN 978-1-55885-166-5

What begins as a gripping adventure tale loses its way in the enormous detail with which its author tells it. Nicholas Cordoba is an impoverished Colombian youth who, dreaming of the gold-paved streets of the U.S., stows away in the submerged air pocket of an oil tanker bound, he thinks, for Miami. His week-long survival of the horrors of that journey is rewarded by immediate arrest when the ship arrives in New York City, for customs agents discover an enormous cache of cocaine on a ledge in his hiding place. He is arrested, found guilty, sentenced to 10 years in prison with the prospect of deportation to Colombia upon his release in 1999. In jail, he falls in love with the author, the prison's 51-year-old English teacher whose three sons, aged 22, 25 and 27, are older than he is, she suggests. They receive permission to marry, hopeful that an appeal will set him free and that the future will hold better things for them. Two thirds of the way through her memoir, however, the author abandons the role of neutral narrator to emerge in the first person as Nicholas Cordoba's wife. But in both guises she is so unsparing of the finest points (we learn, for example, the precise angle at which a customs agent holds his flashlight, how much the author pays for gas and her car payments, her husband's visit to the latrine, the hour and date of a snowstorm) that they dilute the power of this otherwise absorbing tale. (Sept.)