OK, I just would like to read now some parts of this novel
which just came out, published recently by Farrar Straus,
and which will come out in Spanish in January with
the same title like Vecindarios Excéntricos.
Can I have a little bit of water?
Wow, this is water in the middle of the desert.
[LAUGHING]
OK.
This novel is a family saga, and it covers 100 years.
When I started writing it three years ago,
I didn't really think.
I didn't plan to finish it.
Six months ago, it just happened.
But everybody thinks I did it to celebrate the 100
years of the arrival of the American troops in Puerto Rico,
but it was not like that, I swear.
[LAUGHTER] It is just a coincidence.
So actually, the title refers to--
eccentric neighborhoods refers to the fact
that Puerto Rico is an eccentric neighborhood.
It is kind of off the beaten path.
It is strange.
It is unique.
It is exotic, and it has also no center.
We're an island which is always coming and going.
We are a people who are in a way living between two worlds,
and this is the meaning of the title, "eccentric."
It's not just that it's strange, but that it really
has no center, or that it is off-center that also
in another sense more positive perhaps.
It is a frontier, which is what I really
would like to underline because I think it's very important.
I was trying to underline that in the poem
I read to you as language-current because I
believe it's one of the realities of the modern world
that we're living in, that we have to deal with the fact that
being a frontier, you don't have to live right
in the frontier between Mexico and Puerto
Rico, or between Mexico and the States,
or Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic,
which would be our northern neighbor.
I mean, as long as you live in a place
where there are many cultural elements and ethnic elements
living together, you are living in a frontier.
And you have to deal with the fact
of cohabitation and harmonious understanding of all
these different minds that are contributing
to the richness of the sense of place that you have.
This novel is a lot about a sense of place,
and, I mean, it is in the title, Eccentric Neighborhoods.
It also refers to the fact that the place determines
the character of the people.
And that's what I meant when Puerto Ricans are always
coming and going and therefore have
the search, constant search for meaning of their identity.
We're always looking for the meaning of what we are.
I always say that Puerto Ricans are like Hamlets.
We're always looking around to find out
whether we are going to be or we are not
going to be this or that.
[LAUGHTER] And it is sort of like a way--
I mean, to be a Puerto Rican is a state of mind
more than just a place.
It is a place, and it is also a state of mind.
So first, I will read to you from the first part
of the novel.
The novel is divided in two parts.
And the first part refers to a family
which lives from the sugarcane production and who
own a sugarcane hacienda, sort of repeating
the same thing that many of you may have studied
in Maldito Amor, which is translated as Sweet Diamond
Dust.
That same theme is retaken in this novel
and expanded and taken over to the next step, which
would be the industrialization of the island.
So the second part of the novel has
to do with the development of industry
and to the presence of the United States
and the modern world in an island which
had been a very feudal in a way, feudal agricultural society.