Salt Crystals

Colombian writer Bendek’s clear-eyed debut reckons with the colonial past of San Andres, a Colombian island off the coast of Nicaragua in the Caribbean Sea. The story concerns Victoria Baruq, an insurance agent living in Mexico City, who returns to her native San Andres in the wake of a breakup. She’s been away for 15 years and has become “more foreign than native.” Moreover, her parents died in a car accident several years earlier, and she has no surviving relatives. The plot, so much as there is one, focuses on Victoria and the disorientation she feels upon returning home. The writing is earnest and direct as the emotionally wounded Victoria levies barbed resentments at her homeland (“seaweed has morphed into a morass of plastic lids, straws, shreds of packaging”; “white clouds hide behind squat hotels that have clearly seen better days”). As Victoria works to reconnect with members of the community who never left, she recognizes the boundaries between herself and the society she was once a part of. Her attempts to break through result in an unflinching examination of her racial and cultural identity, which is further complicated by a photo she discovers of an ancestor. This heralds an intriguing new voice. Agent: Maria Lynch, Casanovas & Lynch. (Sept.)