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November 20, 2019
Sergio Troncoso's Playlist for His Story Collection "A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.
The stories in Sergio Troncoso's collection A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son are poignant examinations of identity.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"Troncoso's sharp-edged stories speak to the difficult lives of those who, as he writes, are born behind in a race they must run all the same."
In his own words, here is Sergio Troncoso's Book Notes music playlist for his story collection A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son:
I listen to music to think and to find inspiration from its emotions, energies, and rhythms. Music is a fount of creativity for me. When I’m deep in a story in my head and I’m trying to work out a character or plot line, or I’m thinking of the many layers of a story, I listen to music. It’s a way of letting go, of immersing myself in something new that is not writing. My favorite music always inspires me to find that solution that previously bedeviled me, or it loosens something stuck in my brain and I often have an aha! moment where I see what I previously did not see. All of this happens when I lose myself in sound.
A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son is a book of linked stories about immigration, Mexican-American diaspora, perspectivism, and time. Readers will note that this collection of stories is actually a fragmented whole. The stories are in groups for a reason and relate to each other within their groups. Think of this as a cracked mirror, perhaps, from one angle it may look like a fragment of your face, but from another angle you might see a stranger, a monster, even a hero. This is my imaginary soundtrack for this fragmented whole of my imagination.
“All This Time,” by Sting
I’ve loved this song since graduate school, with its up-tempo it masks the dark subject matter, a boy returning home who prefers to bury his father at sea rather than to follow what the priests want. This sense of being haunted at the same time as being uplifted by where you came from, yes, that’s “Rosary on the Border” and “New Englander,” the first two connected stories in my book. Sting’s line, “All this time the river flowed endlessly to the sea” just gets me every time, emotionally. I think of death not in a sad or macabre way, but as a teacher: your inheritance (for good and ill) is what propels you into life.
“Ain’t No Grave,” by Johnny Cash
The sparse sounds of the song, Cash’s gravelly voice at the end of his life, the pain you hear in that voice, the banjo…all of it comes together to take you to what I imagine is a rural landscape, where you are alone, where you fight or die, and even if you fight and die, none of it matters. The point is to want, to keep going, at whatever moment you are given in this life. “When I hear that trumpet sound I’m gonna rise right out of the ground” is meant religiously, but I take it in a different way, as the character David Calderon in “New Englander” takes it: to keep fighting for this unexplored country in life, even in your worse moments.
“Like A Hurricane,” by Neil Young
It’s a song about longing and losing, having something powerful with someone else (perhaps only in your mind) and not having that love returned, or only returned briefly. That eternal, yet ephemeral quality of love. In my mind the lyrics are terrific, but even better is Young’s long guitar solo (my favorite, Berlin 1982 on YouTube), with feedback, and probing, dissonant sounds, and echoes- all of it a sonic world of loss and love. My “Living Museum of Love” is a story where Carlos Garcia searches for history in the present, maybe even to make history present today, with his wife Sarah and even his work. They’re haunted by how they were together, what has been lost, and how they can possibly regain it. I only discovered Neil Young in college, years after Young first wrote the song in 1975, but some music will always be essentially evocative, no matter when you first hear it.
“Just Fine,” Mary J. Blige
Galilea is one of my favorite characters in the book of stories (“This New Now”), and when I hear “Just Fine” I know Galilea would be dancing in the dark in her New York apartment to that infectious, hot R&B beat from Mary Blige’s song. “So I like what I see when I’m looking at me/ When I’m walking past the mirror/ Ain’t worried about you and what you gonna do/ I’m a lady so I must stay classy/ Got to keep it hot, keep it together/ If I want to get better.” It’s such an empowering song, and the staccato delivery, with that beat, just uplifts your heart, even if you’ve suffered tragedies, and men, and loneliness. You never give up, you take control of your life, you don’t allow others to control you, and you revel at each sunset.
“Clandestino,” by Manu Chao
I love the song and album by that name, because it speaks of the displacement, heartache of immigrants across many continents, with a sense of humor and infectious melodies that welcome a listener to a home that is exile. This is Ximena Garza’s story in “Yamecah.” The lyrics, “Correr es mi destino para burlar la ley/ Perdido en el corazón de la grande Babylon” (“To run is my destiny to avoid the law/ Lost in the heart of the great Babylon”), also speak to how immigrants are invisible and unheard in plain sight. The danceable beat with the lyrics of invisibility and exile play against each other, in my mind, and point to that secret, wonderful life within each immigrant that we may overlook even after their perilous journeys.
“This Modern Love,” by Bloc Party
The incessant, insistent beat of “This Modern Love” takes me to the room where teenagers Maribel and Hector are in “Fragments of a Dream.” This love’s a freight train, and nothing will stop them from being on it. The lyrics, “You’ve been trying to reach me/ You bought me a book,” speak to how we try to get into the soul of each other in young love. A bell-like quality to the guitar picking, with the rapid, echo-ey delivery of the vocals, adds to this urgency of two young people who want each other in every way. Until, until…
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” by Tears for Fears
I do love music from the ‘80s and ‘90s, and this song I have always found so sad and poignant. Still true whenever I hear it on the radio: “There’s a room where the light won’t find you/ Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down/ When they do, I’ll be right behind you/ So glad we’ve almost made it/ So sad they had to fade it/ Everybody wants to rule the world.” The song reminds me of the character Marcos Martinez in “Turnaround in the Dark,” who is a lonely, confused soldier in a dangerous situation, a leader wanting to sort out his love life back home in his head. The swirl and tilt of his emotions are dizzying, and the song captures what we strive to be and want to have and how we keep reaching for it at every moment until our last breath.
“C7osure (You Like),” by Lil Nas X
Gosh, I love this song, everything from its danceability to the lyrics (“I know, I know, I know it don’t feel like it's time/ I set boundaries for myself, it’s time to cross the line”) to the rap and drawn-out delivery of certain lines (“I want and I need/…Use my time to be free”): everything just hits me every time I listen to it. And I imagine the two women in “Cross-cutting Rivers in the Sky,” on a turbulent plane ride, both divulging their love lives to this song. The same song can mean two different things for these two characters, and that beat is the plunging and shaking of the airplane as they talk to keep the chaos around them at bay.
“Ni Parientes Somos,” by Los Tigres Del Norte
The playful, inventive, irreverent lyrics of this ‘Take Your Love and Shove It’ song is what I adore. And it doesn’t remind me of the unnamed first-person (male) narrator of “Alone Together,” but of the woman he pines for, who left him. The norteña polka beat and the masterful accordion take me to an image of Melissa skipping and sashaying away to her future, even if uncertain. It’s an anthem for those left behind in love.
“Contagion,” by Stone Cold Fox
I think about apocalyptic times when I hear this song, and so I’m brought to the end of A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son, and specifically to the story “Library Island.” The lyrics about an “apathetic contagion” and the narrator’s wish for help— “What is this world worth/ If you don't know what you're fighting for”— and the desperation in the vocals, the heartbeat guitar, the ominous beat, all of this brings me to the mind of the character Arturo: he wants to survive and even find love when the world around him is falling apart.
“Oh Superman,” by Laurie Anderson
Again, apocalyptic, but this time from that eerie voice calling and claiming to be the narrator’s mother, but she isn’t, or maybe she is, but it’s a Big Mother with “petrochemical arms” and “military arms,” an electronic oppressor of officialdom the narrator wants to embrace. That electronic pulse takes me to a disembodied entity that insists on coming into the narrator’s life, whether or not the narrator wants her at ‘home.’ Even Arturo’s escape into the sanctuary of “Library Island” should create a disconcerting comfort (‘home’) in the reader. Well, I hope it does.
“There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” by The Smiths
This song is really about depressed characters reaching for each other, but what if one character is trapped in one world and one time, and another is trapped in another world and another time? That’s how this song takes me to “Carmelita Torres,” Arturo’s literary obsession through time and how he brings her back to ‘life.’ The lyrics, “Driving in your car/ I never never want to go home/ Because I haven’t got one,” is about living and striving without roots. Don’t some readers find a ‘home’ sometimes with the characters they meet/love on the pages? Well, what if that reader’s desire, in some magical way, also brings these characters to life?
“After the Storm,” by Mumford and Sons
This song, man, this song, just makes me remember my land, my people, my ancestors, and the love I had and have for them: “And I took you by the hand/ And we stood tall,/ And remembered our own land,/ What we lived for.” So I identify it, emotionally, with “Eternal Return,” the last story in A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son, a story that flitters back and forth through time, to Vendo Claridad talking to his dead grandmother about his dreams and heartaches. The poetic lyrics and even the metastable relationship between time and perspective, all of it mirrors the story. We contain multitudes, to paraphrase Whitman, of different people, different times, and even points of view. And we always strive to be one: that’s our quandary.
I want to thank the readers of LargeHearted Boy for listening to this playlist, and I wanted to leave them with this final thought/question: do you ever dream about music? I certainly do. Almost every week, I wake up with a song that has played in my head in my dreams, a specific song. This has happened to me for many decades, and the songs change as I have encountered new music. I don’t know if this is unusual, but I know this means that the music above, and so many other songs, are important to my literary creativity when I’m awake and when I’m in the arms of Morpheus. Thank you for listening.
Sergio Troncoso and A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son links:
the author's website
the author's Wikipedia entry
Kirkus review
Texas Observer review
Deborah Kalb interview with the author
Madam Mayo interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
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