Like Cut Up Earthworms - Reviewing "Extended Stay" by Juan Martinez

A place changes you – a city, a neighborhood, a hotel. A story. You arrived to each with your own fear, your own hunger, and you found yourself taking on the cast and the appetite of where you were. You couldn’t help it.

About one third into Extended Stay I was confused and not sure what Martinez was trying to do here. The half-hypnotic, half-psychedelic narration. The dream-like atmosphere. Confusion. A main character as detached from his reality as he was from his readers. Helpless, directionless, sometimes mean, sometimes aggressive, sometimes opportunistic, sometimes indifferent. An environment teeming with, literally leaking hostility. It really felt like reading a dream, or rather a nightmare-diary. And I didn't like how it affected me, it didn't feel like a kind of fiction I enjoy reading.

Sometimes making a list of everything I know about a book, like I did above, helps me to see what an author is trying to do in their particular work. When I finally realized Martinez' intention, it hit me like a truck. Not only because of its blatancy, but also because I know this, it happened to me too and I felt exactly like this for years. I didn't enjoy reading it, because I didn't enjoy living it and the mind is very powerful in pushing aside things it wants to forget and so there are only some remnants left of that time.

Remnants like the troubles that come with a strange name, a place of birth. Brief moments your head blocks the language and you fall back into your mother tongue. Worst of all, a fracture of a moment in which a sudden dread fills you, in which your everyday life seems alien, you feel like a foreign body in your own life. You're thrown back to a time where everything was incomplete, was dreamlike because you yourself were not complete. You're broken in half and your one half experiences what is "real", the warmth, the feeling of rightness, your one half you left in the country you're from and you're supposed to be in. The other half is you here, who are facing this cold and strangeness and unkindness. You slowly, like an earthworm who keeps growing from where you cut it, start growing from where you have been cut, into directions you didn't think you'd go. You become another person; someone you never might have guessed to become.

But all these cuts, all these remnants don't hurt anymore, as they are from another time. I never knew you could convey this feeling with language, in a story, in a book. Martinez does.

You endure, you close your eyes and think of England. Or Germany. Or America. So does Martinez' protagonist Alvaro.

I keep missing things, he thought. If he could say the right thing, he could fix it all.

Opening with an explosive act of inconceivably brutal violence, Extended Stay then takes the reader to the slums of Las Vegas, specifically into Hotel Alicia. Without having had the time or chance to heal from the first agonizing blow, Alvaro finds himself, together with his sister Carmen, living and working in this deeply disturbing place, interacting with people living there who all leave an aftertaste of questionableness and untrustiness. As Alicia is basically putrefying with each day and turning into a more and more psychedelic nightmare, Alvaro sort of goes along with the flow - swallowing his impotence in the face of circumstances, trying to stay out of trouble, trying to make enough for a living so that one day they might leave this place too.

During his extended stay Alvaro discovers not only the true nature of this place, he also explores the sacrifices you need to bring and whether or not a fight is pointless.

Although, on a personal level Alvaro's story was one I related to and the trauma of involuntarily leaving your home has similar effects for everyone, his experience is, needless to say, much more fucked up than mine could ever be - reflecting on the sans-papiers experience of Latin America, and the rough life on the fringes of USA, combining this experience with the weird, Martinez does everything right in his book. It is not an easy story to read, I think I have chewed on it for about three months, but the realization and the final weight of this story were worth not giving up. A very powerful metaphor for a very powerful life experience.