Jackassalope Book Review

The inspiration for my bolg-before-last stems in part, from the fact that I was half-way through Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation by John Phillip Santos. This book is about three years old. I discovered when I was visting my family back in San Antonio. It was part of a big stack of books my mom was ready to get rid of. I also found, in surfing the web for this entry, that Places Left Unfinished was nominated for the 1999 National Book Award (non-fiction).

The book wasn't really grounded in one time or place, which I thought was fitting. No matter how much we want to appear or believe otherwise, are any of us as grounded as we want to be?

I kind of felt like a ghost drifting through this guy's family history. I really enjoyed it; but it definitely got in my head. It was disconcerting at times. There is this eerie distance between John Santos the author and John Santos the character. Every life event and memory was fodder for poetic prose and postulating, but there was never any room for emotions like sorrow and anger or any confusion. It just made it all so damn foggy and dreamlike. And I was absorbed through it all.

Santos writes a lot about being Mexican-American and what it has done to his famiy history. He also ties it into a shrinking Mexican culture. There is such a depressing contrast between his images of the 1960s San Antonio (and what it meant to be Mexican-American back then) and the San Antonio I grew up in or, even worse, the San Antonio I go to visit today. For me, The Quarry Market is the poster child for paving over the past.



But I grew up on the mighty whitey side of town, and can't even pretend to know what it's like to feel the whitewashing that may be going on throughout the rest of the city. So Places Left Unfinished gave me a perspective I could not have seen on my own.

But what did resonate with me was the search for the essence of people and life in the past. This guy is lamenting he can't retrieve the essence of his family from two generations ago, and I can't bring back two decades ago. Of course, what is richer, and more vital? What is more tragic of a loss? The pulse of a culture and heritage that seems to be slipping and McAmericanized, or my own personal memories of the stretch between Vandiver and Amesbury on the street I grew up on?

I hope everyone gives this book a read, especially those who have a feel for San Antonio. Even if your San Antonio, like mine, is limited to the North side, and the "sheltered enclaves of Olmos Park, whey they got their own police force so you can stay out way past dark" (another James McMurtry quote).

Speaking of quotes, I'll close with a quote I really liked from Places Left Unfinished. There are so many passages like this that have haunted me, even as I go on reading other books and magazines.

"Our vast galaxy is itself in perpetual motion, spiraling further outward into the chill vacuum that creation first exploded into. We have left our past--the journeys, marriages, and deaths along the way, all the bowls of menudo--scattered randomly across those vast arcs and loops, traced through millions of years, spun out across the void. This was our invisible momentum, always carrying us further from the source of our stirring."