Papi

April 11, 2016
Indiana's genre-defying novel, her first translated into English, captures the intensity of a growing up with a drug lord for a father. Told from the perspective of an unnamed 8-year-old girl whose penchant for hyperbole betrays a tenuous grasp on reality, Indiana pulls from her own childhood split between Santo Domingo and the U.S. to highlight the hallucinatory bizarrity of being the daughter of Papi, a drug dealer whose enigmatic stature the young narrator cloaks in a veneer of pop culture references and consumerist excess. Papi showers the narrator with toys and trips until a switchblade in the tire of his Mercedes signals his fall from the unspecified drug trade. The novel dives heavily into surreal aspects of her childhoodâsuch as the narrator and Papi shooting ducks from a car doing doughnuts at 200 miles per hourâwhile taking the occasional breath to ground itself with more concrete details of life growing up in the Dominican Republic. As Papi goes deeper into crime and drugs, Indiana matches her lively sentences to the emotional state of the narrator, including more and more frenetic sequences of fantasy that unfold alongside rising emotional trauma. The prose reverberates with energy; Indianaâwho is a musician as well as a writerâhas a keen ear, and Obejas brilliantly transfigures her prosody into English. Deeply felt and formally inventive, Indiana's novel crackles with intensity and oddity.