Marcos Damián León evaluations Christopher Gonzalez’s debut quick story assortment I’m Not Hungry However I May Eat for Latino E book Evaluate.
I’m Not Hungry However I May Eat by Christopher Gonzalez opens with a narrator hungry to fill the void of his early twenties loneliness with an image—A illustration of misplaced love. Every of Gonzalez’s fifteen tales follows a bisexual Puerto Rican man fueled by deep ache and longing. In “A Mountain of Invertebrates” he writes: “A lot effort and mess? All of that for thus little?” This can be a thread that runs all through the gathering—an exhausting worry that every protagonist and inevitably all of us should work so laborious to search out pleasure in life solely to finish up with the barest crumbs.
Every of those characters share a trauma from youth, of not understanding love from their households and even themselves, and all of them are scared that nobody will ever love them absolutely. We be a part of them on their journeys for companionship: Looking via apps or bars and even childhood reminiscences for somebody who may give them the love they crave.
Gonzalez’s response is to take these little moments of grief and loneliness on the journey in direction of companionship and discover the absurdity of all of it. One story has the narrator attend a celebration thrown by a rich straight couple to rejoice their new washer, one other has a narrator hire out an house he’s purported to be anticipating pals on trip; in one other, an eyebrow artist sews different folks’s eyebrow hair onto the narrator to present him Chris Pine’s eyebrow form. Every of those situations is ridiculous—absolutely enjoying up conditions till we will’t assist to snigger in discomfort.
But, regardless of every of those conditions feeling just like the worst exaggerations of millennial relationship, a sense permeates all of them which the story, “The Secret to Your Finest Self,” sums up as: “And the craving dissipates. And he stops lacking what he can not have.” Every character desires to search out one thing—be it meals or informal intercourse—to function a stand-in for what the shared need for connection. The gathering is asking us: What wouldn’t you do to really feel much less lonely?
But, beneath that query and the absurdity of the tales, there’s a deeper ache. Within the story “Little Strikes,” the narrator Felix grieves his homophobic sister, and, as he tries to determine what to do along with her ashes, he struggles about how precisely to grieve a sister who by no means liked all of him. The story ends with Felix fascinated with the dancing classes his sister gave him in preparation for his future girlfriend, then, he dances along with her urn, so enraptured within the misplaced chance of affection from his sister that he doesn’t discover her ashes spilling all over the place. The fullness of the gathering speaks to loneliness, for every narrator and us, but in addition of a worry that the folks we love can not love all of us. [. . .]
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