"Come Together, Fall Apart": Stories from Panama, a journey of sight, smell

"Come Together, Fall Apart"
by Cristina Henríquez
Riverhead Books, 306 pp., $24.95

Each beautifully crafted piece in Cristina Henríquez's first effort, "Come Together, Fall Apart," stands on its own. These eight stories and a novella, set in modern-day Panama, take the American reader into emotional landscapes of grief, relationship discovery and flashes of peace they will find familiar, even though the vivid descriptions of food, smells and Spanish words take them far from the United States.

Henríquez has an ability to speak candidly in the voice of either gender. Though Isabel Allende has praised this book for its female protagonists, Henríquez's male characters are equally compelling.

For example, in "Yanina" the narrator is a young university student who has been asked by his girlfriend Yanina literally 45 times to get married, beginning with their first meeting.

His perspective on what he at first dismisses as Yanina's clinginess shifts when they take in a man who was like a father to her growing up, as well as his young nubile daughter.

Nicely handled are the tensions between straying and fidelity, the different meanings people apply to acts of flirtation, and the ways humans protect the spaces in their hearts — physically and emotionally.

"Ashes" is another complex interweaving of personal and public imagery: a woman grieving the death of her mother, in a state of loss. She is losing her job because she did not wear the right kind of gloves. She is losing her parasitic lover to a rich woman, and her sense of family, for which her mother was the anchor.

The reader flits into scenery shaped by other people's opinions then readily back into the sensibilities of the protagonist.

All eight short stories deal with love in one form or another, but they do so without seeming sentimental or abstract. We smell the sweat, hear the noises of the city, inhale the crisp air that rises off a rare snowfall.

Only a master can carry a complex sentence as she does in the following from "Drive":

"My hair whips like a fire around my head and somewhere in all this the trees I've been staring at stop looking like trees — it's just a wash of black-green velvet — and instead I see it all: my papi buying me a popsicle dipped in milk when I am young; my mamá, weeping as she hangs the laundry out to dry, using the sheets to dab her eyes; the first time I meet Beto, while I am leaving a shoe store on Avenida Central; the banana leaves brushing the wall behind our house in a storm; my pale blue dress years ago for my quince años, the tiniest round shape of the baby who died in me."

"Come Together, Fall Apart" is the final piece of the set — a novella, and the hardest of all to characterize.

In one sense, it is a depiction of life in Panama during the time Manuel Noriega was in power and then ousted. Tensions on the street, the proliferation of guns and a sense of societal fragility amplify the disintegration of the family central to the story.

The father is dying, even as the children grow older and more independent. It all climaxes with Noriega cooped up in an embassy while American forces blast tasteless rock music at him to get him to leave, and a wrecking ball that pulverizes the family's house where the father wants to die.

This is powerful writing that creates astonishing juxtapositions and is a great centerpiece for a first collection.