Gringa in a Strange Land brings back the “counterculture” of the early 70’s, an exhilarating and confusing time for so many young people then. Erica Mason, an American woman living in Mexico, is torn between working to become an artist and the lure of the drug culture. Set mostly in the colonial city of Merida in the Yucatan peninsula, the story then moves among Mayan ruins, laid-back beaches and the cities of Belize and Oaxaca. A host of bohemian expats and Mexicans, and the complex character of Mexico itself, infuse this portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-American, that culminates in an unexpected resolution.
PRAISE for Gringa in a Strange Land
“Like the artisans who applied kaleidoscopic colors to the Mayan pyramids, Linda Dahl paints a vivid portrait of a young American artist who thrusts herself into the exotic maelstrom of Mexico in the 70’s, on a drug-, booze- and sex-suffused odyssey—a struggle to create art, find herself and seek love—amid the hippies and the druggies, the ordinary folk, the grifters and the adventurers all crossing paths in Merida and Oaxaca. You’ll think of Robert Stone’s work and Barbet Schroeder’s film “More” in that the novel so adeptly renders an era, a country and a state of mind.”
~ Randolph Hogan, former editor of The New York Times Book Review and translator of Gabriel García Ma rquez’s The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
Review by Tyler R. Tichelaar for Reader Views (7/09)
Linda Dahl has recaptured a time and place she knew as a young woman. Her own travel to Mexico in the 1970s inspired her to create her young American artist, Erica Mason, who travels to Mexico to work on her art and to “find herself” in the process.
Gringa in a Strange Land is an episodic novel about a year in the life of Erica as she struggles to become an accomplished artist, living on her own, having various relationships with men, and trying to overcome her prescription drug addiction, particularly to Quaaludes. Erica meets several colorful people, including a doctor hooked on drugs who prescribes them for her; obnoxious, violent, or married men with whom she regrets having a relationship; immature housemates; lesbians who befriend her; and El Autor—a man who dreams of becoming a great author.
The novel focuses upon Erica and her friends, and more specifically her search to become an artist, learning to set her priorities, set aside her quest for a man in exchange for her self-respect, and overcome her drug addiction to focus on her art. She makes slow but steady progress in these goals throughout the novel. There is little plot or action—most of it being internalized in Erica as she undergoes change—but the book is realistic as a portrait of growth in one woman, traveling about Mexico, looking for subjects to paint, and ultimately looking for her own sense of self-worth.
Linda Dahl’s use of character and atmosphere are commendable for how they appear so simple, yet they enrich and perfectly blend together to create an intoxicating world. Dahl sprinkles Spanish phrases throughout the book, which add to the atmosphere without ever distracting the non-Spanish speaker from the book’s purpose or storyline, and Dahl is often at her best describing scenes of Mexico through Erica’s senses as in the following passage:
Erica sometimes spent hours watching the Mayans and the mesitizos and the “pure” Spanish and the pale tourists.She told herself it was al good material and it was: arms open, the Yacatecans fielded the slightest puffs of breeze with expertly wielded fans and languid arabesques of hand movements.There was the sound of drawled Spanish and hushed Mayan, which Erica could never decode.Strips of tires lashed to their tree-hard feet, there were always campesinos, skilled like Africans to bear perpetual burdens of babies and baskets of produce, men and sometimes women carrying capacious bags full of limes.
When Erica was high, the soft, somewhat peevish Mayan voices sounded more like the twitter of tropical birds and she would close her eyes and could imagine she was part of this stream of life.
One might well call this book “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.” It is less pretentious than James Joyce’s classic novel, yet uses multiple languages and explores the character in a Bildungsroman manner. And Erica is more human, far easier to empathize with, and easily more likeable than Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus.
Ultimately, Linda Dahl has captured a time and place, making them come alive again with an effective atmosphere, believable yet eccentric characters, and an internal confusion that becomes an awakening for the main character.Just as a good painting can make a person feel he has stood in a foreign place, Linda Dahl allows the reader to escape through her seemingly effortless and graceful style.In this case, I find it hard to imagine a painting would be worth as many words as Gringa in a Strange Land when finishing the novel is like awakening from a dream of Mexico that felt so vividly real.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Linda Dahl has written extensively about Latin America, jazz, New Orleans and other topics that interest her over a thirty year career as a published author. She has lived in Ecuador, Brazil, Mexico and New York and currently lives in an old farmhouse with lots of flowers and pets. A widow, she has a daughter and a stepson.
