The Cleansing

by George Rabasa

This new twist on the expatriate novel, somewhere between mystery and ethics conundrum, with nods to Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, and Paul Bowles, is about two very different men and their delayed but fated battle for retribution. Paul is a promising med student from the US wending his way through heady, corrupt and gorgeous Mexico City in the 1980s. Victor is a Mexican lawyer with a web of connections on both sides of the drug business and Victor is Paul's would-be cultural as well as underworld guide, who eventually betrays him. What happens when the former friend reappears twenty years later, a cancer patient in the doctor's pathology lab, shows that none of us can escape our secrets.

Flashing between the post-9/11 US and 1980s Mexico, , The Cleansing details a love triangle, or diamond, if you will. Adele, a fearless American and photojournalist, attracts both Paul and Victor, and the three become uneasy friends. Mexico City itself is the fourth player in this game, beautiful and decadent, urban and cosmopolitan, torn between policia and narcos, with the division not as clear as the expatriates first think.

The Cleansing is about a reckoning of moral culpability in a corrupt setting. No matter our excuses, the past will come to find us.

245 pages, Hardcover

First published July 30, 2006

About the author

George Rabasas collection of short stories, Glass Houses, received The Writers Voice Capricorn Award for Excellence in Fiction and the Minnesota Book Award for Short Stories. His novel, Floating Kingdom, received the Minnesota Book Award for Fiction. And his most recent novel, The Cleansing, was named a Book Sense Notable. His short fiction has appeared in various literary magazines, such as Story Quarterly, Glimmer Train, The MacGuffin, South Carolina Quarterly, Haydens Ferry, American Literary Review, and in several anthologies. Rabasa was born in Maine, raised in Mexico, and now lives in Minnesota."

Reviews

[Kenneth Zeigler · Rating 5 out of 5]

It could be argued that what a novel needs to do, beside pull the reader into the story, is provide 1) conflict, 2) suspense, and 3) some sort of satisfaction in the denouement. George Rabasa’s novel The Cleansing provides those things. The suspense was such that I didn’t understand the title until I finished the book. Lots of conflict. And the denouement was a surprise, yes. And it also made sense and pulled everything together – as together as it could be. And not disappointing.
The book tells of a relationship conflict of twenty years duration, the scenes shifting dexterously – i.e., pretty seamlessly while also being lucid – between the 1980s and 20 years later. The three principle characters met up when they were in their twenties and two of them, Adele and Paul, are married in the parts of the plot that transpire later on. The third character, Victor, a well-heeled playboy, being enamored of Adele (as well as of lots of other people apparently, depending on the distinction between sex and affection) inserts himself into this relationship, both in the past and then, surprisingly after 20 years. And this is what Victor’s friendship/antagonism requires the couple to alternately struggle with and ignore. The conflicts here are between Adele and Paul, Adele and Victor, Paul and Victor, and also among the three of them. (Did I leave anything out?)
The Cleansing not only makes the characters come to terms with things people don’t want to come to terms with, but the reader also can’t help recalling difficult relationship encounters of their own – and how difficult those encounters were. Oh, yes, that’s another thing a novel should do for you: make you think more clearly or at least deeply about yourself, your relationships, and your life.

[Annabell Joya · Rating 3 out of 5]

so far so good...