San Juan: Memoir of a City conducts readers through Puerto Rico's capital, guided by one of its most graceful and reflective writers, Edgardo Rodr簿聶翻guez
Juli簿聶翻. No mere sightseeing tour, this is culture through immersion, a circuit of San Juan's historical and intellectual vistas as well as its
architecture.
In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodr簿聶翻guez Juli簿聶翻 invokes the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of characters from his own novels.
On the most tangible level, the city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, fl簿聶翻neurs and beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised between a colonial past and a
commercial future, the San Juan he portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip malls and Tastee Freezes;
asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm trees. "In Puerto Rico," he muses, "life is not simply cruel, it is also busy erasing our tracks." Through this book—available here in English for the
first time—Rodr簿聶翻guez Juli簿聶翻 resists that erasure, thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives.
