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"San Juan: Memoir of a City" conducts readers through Puerto Rico's
capital, guided by one of its most graceful and reflective writers,
Edgardo Rodriguez Julia. No mere sightseeing tour, this is culture
through immersion, a circuit of San Juan's historical and
intellectual vistas as well as its architecture.
In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodriguez Julia invokes
the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of
characters from his own novels. On the most tangible level, the
city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, flaneurs and
beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised
between a colonial past and a commercial future, the San Juan he
portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of
modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip
malls and Tastee Freezes; asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm
trees. "In Puerto Rico," he muses, "life is not simply cruel, it is
also busy erasing our tracks." Through this book--available here in
English for the first time--Rodriguez Julia resists that erasure,
thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city
where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives.
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