A Man of His Village Reviewed by Sandra Boatwright, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 9/24/2006
'Man of His Village' takes dark look at migrant journey to Alaska
Florentino is a Mixtec, a native of Mexico, and a boy of the village of San Felipe Cahuixtlan. His greatest desire is to stay in this community, marry his love Valentina, and become a person of influence. His quest is the title of Tanyo Ravicz's new novel---to become "A Man of His Village."
But times are hard in San Felipe. Food is scarce for everyone, Florentino's father dies in the course of a feud with a neighboring village, and Valentina's family rejects him. The one man with money in the village has his eye on Florentino's twin sister, and he manipulates the community's financial need and superstitious nature against the family.
At 16, Florentino decides to take his future into his own hands, and he heads north, giving himself over to migrant farming. He works his way up and down the west coast of the United States, planting, tending, and harvesting anything and everything. He drives himself and the people around him hard, thinking of that moment when he will return home, laden with gifts and experience, commanding the respect of his community, a man to be reckoned with.
"He got so good that there wasn't a Central Valley onion or lettuce farm where he couldn't have a picking job if he wanted it, it didn't matter how full the crews appeared to be, all he had to do was spit the chew out of his mouth and tell the foreman or grower his name was Florentino Cruz Lopez, and he could dig more dirt, yank more bulbs, gather more heads, and pack more bushels than any other son of a bitch they were paying good money to do it."
But though his bank account swells, success costs him. He loses touch with his village, gives up his friends. He sacrifices his sister Feliciana. He becomes "a lone wolf," a man who "had come to the point of expecting scant kindness from people. Perhaps he had stopped extending kindness in kind." A severe beating from out-of-work union workers forces Florentino into a miserable clarity:
"When does the battle end? When do you say you've won or lost? He had left home to make enough money to keep his family from going hungry. He hadn't been home in five years. Maybe it was time. He would stay in Seattle and get a city job, or he would go home to his own village in Mexico. To hell with farm work. All he had ever done in his life was farm work."
Like some terrible angel of destiny, a Seattle restaurant owner and would-be entrepreneur offers Florentino the job of his dreams: an all-expenses paid trip to Alaska to pick wild mushrooms with her staff. Florentino is still a man moved by the idea of new sights and new adventures, and, above all, the prospect of making better than $160 a day. Gooding seals the deal by advancing him $250. Florentino decides to harvest food-golden, rich luxurious morels-for one last time, before he heads home with his hard-won spoils.
This novel really begins when a bush pilot drops a team of seven pickers---four Seattle urbanites, two Alaskans, and Florentino---off at a tiny lake well off the Dalton Highway, in the middle of a vast, sooty burn. What follows is a descent into savagery that makes "Lord of the Flies" look like a kindergarten skirmish. Florentino treks through an adventure far more inevitable and gruesome than anything Stephen King ever wrote, the "idea of the mushrooms...before him like a miner's lamp."
Author Tanyo Ravicz seesaws back and forth between these two stories, chapter by chapter, stretching out Florentino's present struggle and his remembered, almost-mythologized past, keeping the tension in both stories singing. Along the way, he gives an epic picture of just how Mexico's migrant labor dovetails with the United States' plentiful food supply.
Ravicz is good with description, from his long, frenzied descriptions of Florentino's strawberry picking skills to the fox who "minced into camp and pulled at yesterday's garbage." If this book has a flaw, it's that the language is occasionally too poetic, sometimes creating a sudden and disconcerting distance between the reader and the story. The narrator's tone wobbles a bit---sometimes we snuggle up right inside our hero's head, and other times he appears from a rather sniffy and judgmental distance.
All in all, "A Man of His Village" is a new and weighty take on the typical "lost in Alaska" story, and well worth reading.
Tanyo Ravicz is a sometime Alaskan, sometime Californian, and this novel is his second book.
A Man of His Village
Reviewed by Kristen Galles, Book Club Classics, August 2008
A Man of His Village is a delight! The plot is gripping, suspenseful, and compelling -- I devoured it in two days ... and the action rarely slows down right from the beginning -- even though Florentino reveals his childhood in a series of wonderful flashbacks.
Beyond the engaging plot, the characters are fully realized and quite sympathetic. Florentino is the "hero," but is flawed, even deeply flawed at times. However, even at his darkest I couldn't help but cheer him on.
Thematically, the subject of immigration -- or the reality of immigration -- could really engender interesting discussions. Not that this is a "political" book that sacrifices art in the name of a cause -- not at all. It is more of a hero's journey and the hero just happens to work illegally in the U.S. for a few years.
Also, the portrait of immigration is balanced -- yes, there are many opportunities in the U.S., if you are willing to do back-breaking work for very little pay. Neither Mexico nor the U.S. is vilified or deified -- which results in a complex, thought-provoking, thoroughly enjoyable story with a great sense of adventure, too.
Reviewed by Phil Wagner, The Iconoclast #94
This tale is as new as today's headlines and as old as storytelling: a young man is forced by circumstances of birth and love to seek his fortune in "el norte." On that level alone, Mr. Ravicz depicts a quest and saga filled with compassion and understanding worthy of the great naturalistic, socially-conscious novelists of a century or so ago (such as Zola, Steinbeck, and Frank Norris). But then there is a fine long interlude, a middle passage in which Florentino Cruz (the Mixtec Mexican whose story this is) has an adventure in the Alaskan outback that is like something right out of Jack London (though London too, it is seldom recalled, was a champion of the downtrodden).
The novel is filled with knowing details of peasant village life in Mexico, the travails of migrant farmworkers, and the geography and soul and land of the west coast from tropics to tundra. Following Florentino’s growth from raw, impetuous youth to "a man of his village" is a pleasure and a delight.
Reviewed by Anne Ku, Bon Journal, January 2007
Anyone who has left his home to seek better fortune elsewhere will understand Florentino's challenges in the story. Why leave your home town if it's comfortable and has all that you need and want, including the woman you love? Only the desperate, the brave, the ambitious would leave...
Florentino took upon himself the responsibility for his family and vowed not to look back until he succeeded. The story weaves between the present and the past, with momentum building to a climax in the final Alaskan adventure. Now, I've never been to Alaska but I've definitely been bitten by mosquitoes. Here, in his final adventure, I could feel the intensity of the mosquitoes, the humidity, the raging desperation, and the evolution of greed and obsession. If you read this book, you have to get to the end. Till then, you will not know how Florentino becomes a man of his village.
Having read the last few books by female authors, I was pleasantly surprised by Ravicz’s colourful use of action words, clearly man-speak. As a woman, I cannot imagine the physical brutality though I could more easily recognise the psychological hardship on immigrants, especially illegal ones with no status at all. Once I got to the end, I realised that the hero of the book is not the author. Why not? Read for yourself.