critical response#6

Lawrence Coates’ The Master of Monterey, was an interesting read. Coates incorporates humor with history and cultural backgrounds of his different characters to make them come alive on the page. One of my favorite lines that Lawrence Coates read when he did a reading of the first chapter of his book, was about how Jones plans to set Hannibal “free” when in that very same sentence Jones explained his plans for how Hannibal can be free as long as he is at Jones’ every “beck and call” for “wage[s] to be paid…whenever he remembered” (p. 10). In the sentence we see the irony of this freedom Jones intends to give Hannibal, which indeed is not freedom at all and depending on the quality of Jones’ memory it had the potential to be a step up from what most slaves experienced at the time.

I really liked the distinction Coates made between dialogue and narrative text. Instead of the traditional quotation marks he used an m-dash at the initial start of each speaker’s words; this was a unique touch that I think fit well with the style of the work. Even though he didn’t use another m-dash to indicate where the dialogue ended and where it resumed, it was easy to distinguish because of the distinct voices of the characters and of the narration. I also liked how Coates integrates Spanish and English words and phrases in the dialogue. It makes the characters and dialogue more realistic. I translated the first couple Spanish phrases and was surprised to see that they weren’t the same as the English counterpart also spoken right after the Spanish phrases. It was confusing at first but I found that I liked this style, it made the story and non-Spanish speaking characters more relatable because I was experiencing the same language gap that they were. One exchange that I particularly liked was when Arcadia was telling her husband Rafael Rafael that she was pregnant,

“—estoy embarazada, she said. I can feel it.”
And although she spoke in spanish, he knew exactly what she had said.”(p. 233).

It was a statement that gave the reader a personal connection to the characters and the moment that the two were sharing.