cover image Dante's Ballad

Dante's Ballad

Eduardo Gonzalez Viana. Arte Publico Press, $23.95 (299pp) ISBN 978-1-55885-487-1

Viana's second book to be translated into English (after story collection American Dreams) is a kaleidoscopic fever-dream that drags long-suffering illegal immigrant Dante Celestino from Oregon to Las Vegas and back a few times as he searches for his runaway daughter. The day of Dante's daughter's quinceanera, she runs away with her low rider-driving gangster boyfriend. After hearing they may have fled to Las Vegas, Celestino repeatedly attempts journeys to find her, and passes the time between telling Virgilio (a donkey), among other things, the story of his and his deceased wife's long-ago border crossings. Celestino is undaunted by losing everything and starting over again, just as Viana is unafraid of periodically chucking the narrative and starting again almost from scratch. The doubling-back of Dante's journey allows Viana to set up straw men of his ideological bogeymen-uninformed liberal educators, touchy-feely types, unreconstructed South American fascists-and ridicule them. Though Viana's subject is certainly worthy of a sprawling story, this epic meanders in its long middle section and skimps on the denouement and resolution. The topics are of interest, but the telling goes over the top.