Dear Commons Community,
I have just finished reading Hombrecito, a novel by Santiago Jose Sanchez. It is a book that reviews the life of a troubled gay immigrant, Santiago (same first name as the author), who struggles with his sexuality, his family, and his life in the United States. He comes from Columbia but much of the novel takes place in Miami and New York as well as his native, Ibague, Columbia. The book provides a lot of introspection. Hombrecito‘s strengths are surely how the author analyzes Santiago’s relationships with his mother, father, and brother. The ending chapters focus extensively on his mother and father.
In sum, I found it a good summer read.
Below is a review that appeared in BookPage.
Tony
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BookPage
Hombrecito
By Santiago Jose Sanchez
Review by Laura Sackton
Santiago Jose Sanchez’s debut, Hombrecito, is a queer coming-of-age following a boy’s life from Colombia to Miami to New York. It’s a heartbreaking pleasure to get lost inside these pages.
In their haunting debut novel, Hombrecito, Santiago Jose Sanchez illuminates the hidden. The story begins in Ibagué, Colombia, a city that the protagonist, Santiago, returns to again and again, in dreams, memory and reality. Santiago is a young boy trying to make sense of a world he doesn’t understand: his absent father, his mother who sometimes “forgets she is a mother,” his feelings of alienation and otherness. When he moves with his mother and brother to Miami, those feelings continue to grow, even as he begins to embrace his queerness.
Sanchez traces Santiago’s search for belonging as he grows up and eventually leaves home for college in New York. The story follows the expected beats of a queer coming-of-age novel, but does so at a slant. Time moves unexpectedly. Scenes that take place over a few hours go on for pages; several years pass in the blank space between chapters. The prose is intensely visceral and deliberately opaque. It feels as if the narrator holds both himself and the reader at a distance before, distraught and needy, suddenly pulling them close. It’s a heartbreaking pleasure to get lost inside these pages.
Santiago’s complicated relationships with his brother and his mother shift with time, but never get easier. This is true of every relationship in Santiago’s life. There’s his first boyfriend, whom he meets in an internet chat room; his father back in Colombia, who drifts in and out of Santiago’s life; his roommate in New York; the men he sleeps with but doesn’t show himself to. His relationships to places are equally fraught: He longs for Colombia even as he distances himself from it. He leaves Miami but feels constantly pulled back by his mother.
Hombrecito is a novel about the events, sometimes unseen, often beyond our control, that shape our understanding of the world. It’s about growing up amid silences that reverberate into adulthood. It’s about self-destruction and self-denial; about fierce and unconditional love; about the cost of hiding and the turmoil of leaving a country. It’s about queerness and transience and one man’s long, slow journey to find a home inside both.
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