I find myself bound in appreciation of the legitimacy of Rodriguez’s story. It is, without a doubt, an intimate portrayal of family life, personal emotions, and conflict within a person who has been given no opportunity to anticipate assimilation.

While I often find many emotional narrations of authors to be more or less contrived, hers do not seem to be so. Though I may disagree with certain sentiments concerning our acceptance of foreigners in Vancouver, I cannot argue with or against the immigrant experience within this context.

That being said, her use of metaphor in “Black Hole” is one I can only appreciate at an emotional level, not an artistic one. While the sentiment of blackness and morbidity may manifest itself in her, I find it a tad too generic to be one I might consider compelling on a literary level. I don’t mean to sound arrogant, and I don’t think that my view is compulsory, but the “black hole” concept is one I associate with a lack of objectivity and irrational negativity.

Of course, her story is still a personal one despite the more broad aspects of it. Descriptions of torture are powerful regardless of context, and I did feel a painful discomfort while reading them.

As in Alvarez’s novel, the book straddles the line between autobiography and fiction, but obviously this book does not amount to a start-to-finish, or rather finish-to-start method. However, I take this book as a more literal approach to immigration and political exile than that of Alvarez’s, in that it is more black and white and less personal. Alvarez combined politics and identity with a coming of age tale, while this is more of a fragmented telling of events within less plausible characters. It is, I find, less personal that How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, though probably more factual in content.

I’ve always thought that Vancouver was a place where art wasn’t recognized, but Rodriguez gives me hope!