FICTION

AFRICAN PASSIONS by Beatriz Rivera (Arte Publico Press: $9.95 paperback; 168 pp.). The story from which this collection derives its title is populated with African spirits such as Eleggua and Shango, called forth by one Teresa Bos to make her boyfriend fall in love with her. It’s an odd tale, falling into farce as the ill-fated couple drives around New York City trying to bury a cat, and resembles the book’s other seven stories primarily in its protagonist--Teresa, a well-educated, determined Hispanic woman who can’t find the proper balance in life. This is a fine collection, dealing tangentially with the expected subjects of cultural assimilation and identity, but succeeds mainly because Beatriz Rivera’s female characters seem so vividly, touchingly real if misguided, which amounts to the same thing. Miranda Xuarez, a Cuban exile in New Jersey, hounds her submissive husband to an early grave trying to become as rich and fashionable as Jackie Kennedy; Kiki, a recent college graduate, can’t get a decent job and always falls for married men, her critical mother having programmed Kiki for failure; Cristina, a hot-shot television reporter, discovers she is too much like her father, that she’s unable to maintain a relationship because after falling madly in love she “became a monster in order to prove it”; Paloma, a beautiful Caribbean or Central American woman, is driven to distraction by the fact that photographs make her look “common.” Rivera writes with passion and humor and little subtlety, but the author’s lack of guile makes her brazen, unreflective, nonplussed heroines remarkably sympathetic. In “African Passions” (partly funded by the National Endowment for the Arts) Rivera does for her characters what no camera can do for Paloma--captures their energy and tumultuous private lives.