Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina is her first published volume, a slim collection of eleven stories about women of mixed Latina and indigenous ancestry grappling with identity, sexism, and cultural changes in the rapidly shifting landscape of Denver, the author’s hometown. The book was shortlisted for the National Book Award (won by Trust Exercise) and the Story Prize (won by Everything Inside) and made numerous year-end top ten lists for 2019, due, I assume, to its beautiful prose and the window it opens on to characters and subcultures that do not often appear in contemporary literary fiction.
The title story is told through the eyes of Corina, remembering her cousin Sabrina with whom she shared much of her childhood before they grew apart as Sabrina became more licentious, and who has now been strangled by some unknown man months after the last time Corina saw her, the latest in a long string of women in her family killed or harmed by men. That leads into “Sisters,” which jumps back a few decades to tell how Corina’s aunt was blinded by a violent man – and how little people even seemed to care about what happened to her. “Tomi,” one of the standout stories in the collection, is told by a woman who’s just coming home from prison to live with her brother and his son, the title character, as she tries to rebuild trust with her family even as Tomi is struggling with his mom leaving the family, leading to a confrontation when Tomi tries to go see his mother across town. Every story has some incident of death or another kind of loss, set against the backdrop of a city that marginalizes women of color in multiple ways – economically, geographically, socially – and creates the conditions for these cycles to repeat themselves.
I wouldn’t put this among the top contenders for this year’s literary awards – at this point, the Pulitzer is really the only significant one left – because there just isn’t enough here. The stories are great, without a letdown in the collection, but there is a sameness across the volume that made me want Fajardo-Anstine to stretch out beyond these themes and character archetypes. I assume she will do so as she grows as a writer, whether in more short stories or in longer forms of fiction, but by the time I reached the final story, the plaintive “Ghost Sickness,” I realized how similar the characters and settings had become over the course of the book. There’s a tenuous quality to the stories, especially their main characters, where I felt connected to what was happening but not to the women at the centers of these events, and in nine or ten of the stories the protagonist might as well have been the same person. It is a very promising debut effort, however, a bit like a rookie season by someone you think is going to become a star in another year or two – just not as well-developed a work as you’d expect of someone further in their career.
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I’d set a goal for myself for 2019 to read ten works of literary fiction, and this marked the tenth such work I’ve read, which means I feel like I have read enough to rank them. This isn’t a Pulitzer prediction in any way, but a matter of personal preference. I wouldn’t be shocked to see something from this list win the award for fiction next month, though.
1. Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken
2. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
3. Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg
4. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
5. Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat
6. Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
7. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
8. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
9. Exhalation by Ted Chiang
10. Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
The one 2019 work of fiction I haven’t read but plan to read when I can is Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House. If something I haven’t read wins the Pulitzer, I’ll read that too.