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Amigoland

Oscar Casares
Little, Brown & Company (2009)
ISBN 978031615969
Reviewed by Enid Grabiner for RebeccaReads.com (10/09)

Estranged brothers, Don Fidencio and Don Celestino, the oldest and youngest of a large Mexican American clan are in their declining years.  Don Fidencio, 91, is confined to Amigoland, a nursing home.  He feels stripped of his independence and is resentful that he is forced to cope with the mortification of incontinence, insomnia and memory loss.  Don Celestino, decades younger, is recovering from a heart attack and living on his own, but is also aware of his own diminishing physical abilities.  Self-reliant now, he sees his future with its impending indignities of old age and illness looming over him.

Don Celestino has recently become enamored of Socorro, a younger Mexican housekeeper who cleans for him.  She is warm and compassionate and longs for a relationship. His caring advances help to initiate an affair between them.  She encourages him to reconnect with his brother, which he reluctantly does.  They visit Don Fidencio at the nursing home and exchange old memories. 

Most intriguing is the tale Don Fidencio insists is fact. He insists that a group of Indians raided the family’s Mexican ranchito while the residents were enjoying a circus.  Most of the people were murdered and scalped.  Their grandfather, just a young boy at the time, was kidnapped, but eventually was dropped on the other side of the river, left to fend for himself.  He found an uncle who raised him and he never returned to Mexico. 

Although skeptical of the veracity of the legend, the brothers and Socorro set out to find the truth.  As they take Don Fidencio on a journey back to Mexico, the three each discover things about their past as well as their present as they test each other along the way.  They learn to accept their own humility and to respect the needs of each other.
There is much humor in this book, but at the same time Casares compassionately makes so vivid the realities of advancing years and declining health.  Old age can suck!!


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