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    <name><![CDATA[David]]></name>
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  <id type="integer">6139012</id>
  <isbn>0811218023</isbn>
  <isbn13>9780811218023</isbn13>
  <ratings_count type="integer">63</ratings_count>
  <text_reviews_count type="integer">14</text_reviews_count>
  <title>The Halfway House (New Directions Paperbook)</title>
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  <id type="integer">236167</id>
  <name>Guillermo Rosales</name>
  <ratings_count type="integer">65</ratings_count>
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    <rating>4</rating>
  <votes>2</votes>
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  <read_at>Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009</read_at>
  <date_added>Fri Jun 26 14:49:28 -0700 2009</date_added>
  <date_updated>Fri Jun 26 14:50:01 -0700 2009</date_updated>
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    <body><![CDATA[Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita… In the middle of my life’s journey, I came to myself in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. That’s how Dante’s Inferno begins, and this is pretty much the starting point for Rosales’ hellish little novel about Cuban exile William Figueras. After his American relatives greet him at the airport, expecting a successful man of letters but finding a bitter and irrational husk gibbering insults, Figueras finds himself shunted to a succession of psychiatric wards and asylums, winding up at long last in the circle of hell realized by a converted Miami home packed to the gills with dazed and suffering souls, watched over with casual cruelty by the demons of this place – a sports fishing capitalist and his degenerate, abusive flunky. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Or as Figueras says, “The house said ‘boarding home’ on the outside, but I knew that it would be my tomb.” The book is completely unflinching in its depiction of these lower depths, and the hapless castaways that populate its cells and hallways, enfeebled by age, insane, crippled, or simply abandoned by the living, breathing world that exists all around them, and yet seems at an unbridgeable remove from their sordid, shambling existence. But the reek of urine or the tang and stench of other vile bodily frailties and exigencies are not the most disturbing thing. For many readers the book will cross a threshold when the narrator himself, a man of learning if questionable sanity, takes part in the cruel treatment of his fellow inmates. This happens in Dante also, when the narrator does terrible things to the damned like kicking at heads that emerge from the brimstone, but Dante enjoys a rock-hard certainty about the damned and deserving status of his victims, while for Rosales/Figueras, life seems to have more to do with chance than karma. There is hope here, too – the kind of hope that noir buffs such as me can spot a mile off – and a romance, of sorts. I shouldn’t say more, but I hope I’ve given enough of a window on the various debasements of this book that when I say the book is beautiful, it will resonate with the sort of reader who knows what that means, and drive away the rest. It is beautiful, not like a car crash, or like a ruin, or like cancer. It is beautiful like Dante.]]></body>
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