Paradise Travel

by Jorge Franco

Book Overview

With stolen cash and tickets booked through a shady travel agency, Marlon Cruz and his girlfriend, Reina, have smuggled themselves out of Colombia and into the United States. But on their first night... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374229775
• ISBN13: 9780374229771
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

"...I always think of English as the language of necessity."

Paradise Travel is more than a harrowing tale of an illegal immigrant's experience in New York City, Marlon Cruz separated from Reina on the first night they arrive at their coveted destination, exhausted, nothing as it was promised when they made plans in Medellin, Colombia. Stepping out for a smoke, Marlon comes face to face with a policeman. Startled, he panics, running into the night; soon he is lost in a city where everything looks the same, a stranger in a strange land without even a common language to protect him. Reina has engineered the details of their lives from the start of their romance in Colombia, drawing him with the force of her will into this terrifying journey to New York, the gold at the end of their rainbow. Without his muse, Marlon is pathetically vulnerable, wandering homeless until sympathetic Colombians take him in, clean him up and set the handsome young immigrant on the path to redemption from the nightmare of the unwelcoming streets. For one year and three months, Marlon spends all his time and energy in pursuit of his lost love. His experiences along the way are charged with desperation and an urgent need for anonymity in New York City: "its millions of inhabitants; its blocks of cement, iron and glass; its tons of garbage; its time and energy, the madness and the blood." Those who befriend the distraught Marlon hear constantly of his love, his mission to find Reina in this vast sea of unfamiliar faces. He resides in flophouses, walk-ups that sleep three to a room, floundering among outcast alcoholics and prostitutes, willing to tolerate any condition until he can locate his woman, "until I found Reina I would live through whatever hell New York had to offer", not anticipating even one day of relief: "I was learning to live inside the intestines if the beast and feed off it, always careful not to provoke my host." Moving back and forth in time, between Colombia, New York and Miami, Marlon incrementally reveals his story, the early days of Reina's determined seduction, the harrowing journey from country to country, courtesy of Paradise Travel, a front for moving illegals as tourists. With few clothes and money to bribe officials every step of the way, the ordeal is an unrelenting hell of trafficking, kidnapping, extortion, vicious coyotes and border guards, all looking to make a profit from the hushed masses dressed in black who shuffle through the night to the commands of their indifferent guides, "leaving their memories behind", along with identities, addresses and photographs. From the confusion of that first terrifying night in New York, Marlon's emotions seesaw between fear and hope, new friends and a loving woman left behind when he picks up Reina's trail. With Reina as the more aggressive, dominant partner, Marlon has been the weaker of the pair, in thrall to her expectations. But the naïve, frightened young man is transformed by his trials, his harsh life lessons in dramatic relief in the hands of a courag