You Should Read THE APARTMENT by Ana Menéndez
Reading Notes
In sixth grade, I chose books like this: I’d go to the school library with my best friend, close my eyes, and run my finger along the spines. If I landed on a book with two copies, we’d each check one out. If I didn’t, we’d take turns repeating the process until we did.
Nowadays, I still choose my books by feeling, but instead of waiting for my finger to brush against a duplicate title, I wait for a book to call me. The sensation is like an internal tug, drawing me toward a title I may have ignored on my nightstand or walked past at the library for months.
It sounds ridiculous, I know! But take The Apartment by Ana Menéndez: I wandered the library at the beginning of February on a cold and gloomy weekend, the weather gray and uninspiring, all of us waiting impatiently for the bluebird days of a Colorado spring. The sun-washed color palette on the book’s spine cheered me, and when the flap mentioned “a Cuban concert pianist,” I stopped reading and put it in my bag immediately. I recently discovered the music of Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona and am learning two of his piano pieces. I needed to know more about this Cuban pianist; I needed to read this book.
This brief connection was a fitting introduction to The Apartment, which is itself about the bonds, both physical and spiritual, that connect tenants of a single apartment over seventy years. Menéndez tells us the apartment is “a castle of sublime limpidity, and the rooms connect to one another like diamonds on a string, infinite” (80).
Throughout the book, apartment 2B at the Helena in Miami Beach turns over eleven times, its occupants ranging from newlyweds in 1942 to a troubled painter in 2012. The tenants have little to no knowledge of each other, yet traces remain from each. An Argentine refugee in 1984 finds a newspaper article about the death of an earlier tenant, and paint splattered by one lodger raises questions for the next. The premise could lend itself to a set of linked short stories, and there may be readers who view the book this way. But that interpretation undersells Menéndez’s vision.
Two structural choices anchor this book as a novel. First, short, italicized interludes join one tenant’s story to the next. These interludes, reminiscent of the middle “Time Passes” section in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, personify the apartment. “Homes also dream; they shelter themselves,” Menéndez writes (80). With an omniscient perspective, these passages also offer a break from the close third point-of-view of characters who live in the apartment. We overhear conversations from maintenance workers and observe mice and insects that reside in the empty space. One of my favorite images spans the gap between a Colombian immigrant carrying out a green card marriage and a journalist fired after the financial crisis:
“From the corner formed where the refrigerator meets the counter, there drops another, more delicate shadow. It sways beneath the night light, centimeters from the countertop: a spider, all patience and spindle-legged elegance. She hovers for a moment before hauling herself back up.”
As my second-grader tearfully informed me after reading Charlotte’s Web with her class last week, spiders don’t live very long, but Menéndez’s depiction of the spider makes me imagine this very same insect hovering above Sophie in 1942 and Eugenio in 1963 and Marilyn in 1994 and Lana in 2012. When Lana eventually moves into 2B, she traps the apartment’s mice. Rather than killing or releasing them, she keeps them safe in a cage with “[t]hree levels and five exercise areas” (197). The mice, like the people who live in 2B, are refugees.
One of Lana’s neighbors, Fefa, escaped to Miami Beach from Cuba. Lana tries to avoid Fefa and her crazy outbursts, but she can’t avoid her forever. Fefa pounds on Lana’s door one night and describes her experience in Cuba:
“Imagine someone awful comes to power in this country, begins to change everything, begins to divide the country, to shut down the press, to co-opt the courts. Begins to wreck your institutions one by one. Installs his family members into positions of power. All for the glory and profit of himself. Those who disagree can leave. Or go to jail. Or be at the wrong end of police clubs. How would you like that?”
Fefa, I would not like that. Actually, wrong verb tense, wrong pronoun: I do not like this at all!
Neither does Lana, and while she doesn’t know how to respond to Fefa or her other busybody neighbors, she can’t help but listen to them.
Lana’s story is Menéndez’s other novelistic choice. While the first two-thirds of the book cover ten occupants, the final third is devoted to Lana . . . and the ghost/spirit/energy of a previous tenant. [Footnote: One character who doesn’t believe in ghosts believes that “we are our own ghosts, dragging our mournful pasts behind us forever” (134).] Lana, like other residents before her, is a painter. She’s troubled by the death of a loved one and tries to isolate herself with her art, but her neighbors in the building refuse to let her wallow. They bake for her. They tell her stories. They deny her desire to disconnect from society—and that, to me, is what The Apartment is about.
There’s no way around it: We are all products of and subject to our particular historical moment. That doesn’t mean, however, that we are limited to it. In The Apartment, the tenant who posthumously resides with Lana, knows this all too well: “If only I inherited a different story . . . But I was caught in my small human vanities. The world moves forward. The past is immutable concrete, subject only to erosion. But we can alter the future, even after death, we can map a new story” (222-3).
Our stories might seem small, might seem like a collection of “small human vanities.” But when we share them, as Lana learns from her neighbors, they become larger than us—they outlast us—they, if we are paying attention, map out a way to live better.
Reading as a form of paying attention means that we must ask ourselves, in each story, whose perspective isn’t heard and what they might say if given a chance. Reading The Apartment offers snapshots into lives of Americans and immigrants who are often ignored. I’m not going to stand on a soapbox and proclaim that reading will save us from hatred and discrimination. It won’t!
But do you know what might?
Listening, like Lana does, to stories from people we don’t like. From people that society labels “crazy” or “wrong.” From people who keep secrets in order to stay alive.
If you’re not quite ready to listen yet, that’s okay. Read The Apartmentuntil you are.
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 2023
Setting: Miami Beach
Timeline: 1942-2012
Narrator: close third POV from most tenants; close first POV from one tenant; omniscient interludes that transition between tenants
Book Club
In Lana’s section, she “loosens the gummy paint” on the wall and pries loose a “mezuzah” (165), which was put there in the ‘60s by Eugenio. According to Britannica, a mezuzah is a “small folded or rolled parchment . . . with scriptural verses to remind Jews of their obligations toward God.” Lana cleans the paint from the object and inspects it. What do you think this object might symbolize for Lana?
Cuban expat Lenin explains why he prefers the Spanish version of the phrase “if only”: “Si solo sounds truer than If only. One rhymes with loneliness. The other just means empty hope” (182). What experience do you have with other languages? If you’re able to compare the same phrase in two languages, which do you prefer? Why? If you don’t speak any other languages, look up a list of idioms in another language. Find one that sparks discussion. Although it may sound strange to English-speakers, how might it also help you see a familiar object or situation with fresh eyes?
Close Reading
Sandman, a Vietnam vet struggling from PTSD, moves into 2B in 1972. As he walks to the apartment from a payphone, he suffers from hallucinations:
“His hands tingle, and he feels hollow. As if those last medics had taken out his insides, cleaned him out. Something off with his brain—he knows this—brain not connected quite right. The vision off. He follows a sound. From the direction of Flamingo Park an army marches toward him. An army of ashen-faced zombies. Dozens of them. Sandman reaches for his rifle, comes up empty. Behind the pale soldiers, a platoon of Nixons, faces smeared with blood.”
Ten sentences make up this passage, based on where Menéndez places periods, but only four are grammatical sentences with subjects and predicates. If I were to label each sentence, it would look like this:
Sentence (compound)
Fragment (technically there is an independent clause buried between the dashes, but I’d still classify this as a fragment)
Fragment
Fragment
Sentence (simple)
Sentence (simple)
Fragment
Fragment
Sentence
Fragment
Earlier in Sandman’s chapter, the syntax is more coherent, but as his mind begins to break away from reality, his syntax fragments as well. Sentences become shorter or even non-existent, and we understand how much trauma he carries from Vietnam. This fragmentation also has the effect of closing the narrative distance. We are right in Sandman’s head, even as he’s falling apart. It’s significant, then, that when he reaches the beach at the end of the chapter and rushes to save the baby turtles, the syntax returns to “normal,” the fragments nearly but—crucially—not entirely eliminated.
Creative Writing
Nonfiction: Lenin recounts a time he missed a job interview because he was running late: “When I finally crawled past the crash scene, I barely registered the stretchers, the two cars on their backs like beetles, a third flattened against the containment wall” (193). If he had been on time, he would have been involved in that accident. Think of a time when your life could have taken a different trajectory. It doesn’t need to be a life-or-death situation like Lenin’s. Imagine you took the alternate path. Who do you meet? Where do you end up? What do you lose, and what do you gain? Take a speculative approach to nonfiction writing here.
Fiction: Imagine someone moves into your house. You might choose to leave it furnished, or you might leave it empty. Either way, what evidence and energy from your time in the house remains? Inhabit the eyes of a character who walks through your space and wonders about who you are or were. What assumptions do they make? What do they get wrong? Or right?
Sentence Study
Menéndez opens her book with a short passage about an indigenous woman gathering turtle eggs long before Miami Beach has been conquered by explorers and real estate tycoons:
“And she, who turns herself now to the wind, under a strangely yellowing sky, cannot know about them. But you who exist outside of time, look: The setting sun drops its boulder of night. Within heartbeats, the land disappears. In the morning, out of the mangroves rise hundreds of new buildings, smooth and whiter than sand—dazzling in their monstrous beauty.”
In these opening pages, Menéndez signals that the scope of her narrative voice is larger than a single character or even a single generation. She sets the tone for the rest of her novel. Without this moment, readers might not be prepared when Sophie’s 1942 section gives way to Eugenio’s 1963 story.
The second person “you” turns this moment into a direct address to the reader. It acts as an invitation. This moment is an excellent example of the writer’s contract with the reader: Come with me, Menéndez seems to say to us. I interpret the “you” as readers who aren’t limited to time. Time-traveling is one of the joys of reading. In just a few sentences, Menéndez jumps us through hundreds of years of history.
When we arrive in the 20th century, with “new buildings,” Menéndez carefully closes this short scene with a paradox: “monstrous beauty.” The two words seem to contradict each other, yet there is clear logic beneath the pairing. Apartment 2B, which is in one of those buildings, offers shelter to itinerant people. While that might be a beautiful aspect of it, it is equally true that the buildings cause a loss of habitat for animals in the area, such as the turtles. Menéndez returns to the turtles in 1972 when Sandman spends a night returning baby turtles to the ocean. Distracted by the city lights, they head the wrong way, but he and others save them. The confused turtles are a “monstrous” side effect of modern society, but the peace and joy they offer Sandman, a Vietnam vet affected by PTSD, are also a source of “beauty.”
