Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me (review)

What you have to love in Jaime Manrique’s gossipy, irreverent collection of essays, oscillating between the biographical and the critical, is the unabash-edly pleasing tone of its revelations. Although some might think that Manrique goes too far, especially in placing himself on a par with three queer Latino literary icons—Reinaldo Arenas, Federico García Lorca, and Manuel Puig—I think that one can’t delve deeply enough into the territory of desire that many critics have simply ignored (or even denied) in their analyses of the works of great writers. By including himself in the company of these three, Manrique adds an utterly intimate, human dimension to the tales he tells, turning them into life stories. Others might fault Manrique for paying too much attention to the “secret lives” of his subjects and not enough to their artistic accomplishments, which remain underappreciated in the context of Latino writing and in the larger sphere of New World literature. Yet his admiration for these writers is everywhere apparent, and perhaps the sincerest form of flattery is for him to have imitated them in this way, honoring them for who and what they really were. Manrique offers the reader humor if not humility, candor and not condescension, and, ultimately, a synthesis of shared experience that says a lot about the power of silence and shame—and the even greater power of the human spirit, through evocative, irrepressible language, to overcome.