The Last Tortilla & Other Stories
by Sergio TroncosoThe University of Arizona Press, $40 hard, $17.95 paper
Don’t judge The Last Tortilla & Other Stories by its title. Otherwise, it would be easy to dismiss this new collection of short stories as a batch of work which treats cultural artifacts or institutions — tortillas and motherhood, for example — as charming, ethnic trinkets. Troncoso does neither in his mostly solid collection.
A native of El Paso, and the son of Mexican immigrants, Troncoso attended Harvard University and then Yale, where he studied international relations and philosophy. He currently makes New York City his home, but El Paso and the experience of navigating between cultures are the basis of many of the stories in The Last Tortilla. However, Troncoso traverses more territory than the Mexican-in-an-Anglo-world one has come to expect from other Mexican-American writers. His stories explore differences in age, class, the college educated vs. the street smart, and ideas of what it means to be Mexican north and south of the Rio Grande. But these ideas are not the forefront of each story. What the reader will first encounter is Troncoso’s ability to magnify the small gestures and events of life that are packed with meaning, but go unspoken because language to describe them is elusive. Fortunately, Troncoso finds the precise words to describe these events and crafts them with great care.
Standouts include “A Rock Trying to Be a Stone,” the tale of boyish mischief gone horribly wrong and the anger the narrator feels, expressed in one small gesture. The solitary habits of an intelligent nerd are detailed in “The Snake.” The most charming story of the collection, “The Gardener,” shows how an elderly woman and her equally elderly gardener decide to seal their friendship. The collection ends full circle from where it began with “Angie Luna,” the story of a young man’s coming of age with a beautiful, older woman, to “My Life in the City,” where the first blush of attraction between a man and a woman, in an otherwise impersonal city, is handled with style and surprising tenderness. There is only one dud in the collection, which relies on a deus ex machina to finish off an otherwise compelling story. In spite of this, The Tortilla & Other Stories is a satisfying read from a writer to be watched.
Sergio Troncoso will be at Barnes & Noble Guadalupe on Friday, October 1 at 7pm.
This article appears in October 1 • 1999.