Holiday Heart

Margarita Garcia Robayo
(translated by Charlotte Coombe)

Charco Press

In the latest translation from Charco Press, motherhood, marriage, and Latinidad are explored through a husband and wife who are utterly flawed, weaving each character’s neurosis and disappointment from one chapter to the next. It is a piercing portrayal of an unravelling relationship.

‘A homeland is something that moves with you,’ argues the unfulfilled protagonist of Margarita García Robayo’s novel Holiday Heart. As a wife, a mother, a citizen of the world, Lucía is unfixed. Unlike her husband Pablo, who holds some nostalgic affinity for Colombia, Lucía associates with nowhere beyond her present. She makes a show of rejecting any sense of ‘geographical belonging’. Rejection is a card she masterfully deals throughout her life; be it patriotism, friendship, or traditional gender roles. The couple are at breaking point when we meet Lucía, who has taken her two young twins and escaped to her parents’ Miami condominium for some respite from her ailing husband. He is suffering from ‘holiday heart’ after an episode of excess drink, drugs, and adulterous sex.

In Charlotte Coombe’s translation, each acidic assertion of American life is captured with terse precision. Lucía and Pablo see the United States as the land of extreme gluttony and vacuous airheads—a country that neither character likes in spite of calling it home for years. Lucía has as much contempt for her own life as she does the United States. It’s full of insufferable people that she cannot make sense of; even her children are at times undecipherable, and disgust her.

Latina womanhood often depicts the mother figure as divine, holy and innate. Lucía is is none of that. Instead, she is selfish, irresponsible, and impatient to a fault. Motherhood is something thrust upon her and which she is not particularly good at. In Lucía and Pablo’s marriage, their children serve not so much as a bridge but more as a chasm dividing them further. The twins are aliens who take her body hostage during pregnancy. This sense of the uncanny spills out into her marriage. Her husband is someone she no longer understands, and by the end, has grown estranged from.

Like the novel, life is full of many people who don’t like their circumstances, but who rarely have the resolve to do anything about it. Robayo’s flawed married couple are uncomfortably realistic. They are passive, unlikeable, and in no way heroic. Holiday Heart is a poignant and searing story of love ending. It unapologetically holds a mirror up to many facets of life that are not so much poetic, but painfully true and uncomfortably raw.

—Andrés N Ordorica