Still Love in Strange Places: A Memoir
By Beth Kephart
Norton, 224 pages, $24.95
In her new book, “Still Love in Strange Places,” memoirist Beth Kephart (“A Slant of Sun,” “Into the Tangle of Friendship”) writes about people and events that are far from her in place and time.
Married for 15 years to an artist from El Salvador and living with him in a Philadelphia suburb, she is trying to close the gap between their worlds with words. “But there is no knowing most things,” she writes, “there is only the sitting close and listening, only the imagining later on.”
That sentence sums up Kephart’s main strategy for “Still Love in Strange Places,” a book about many things but especially a remote coffee farm and the ways it defines her husband, Bill, and separates her from him.
Enchanted with tales about her husband’s grandfather, Carlos Alberto Bondanza (who was nearly executed for political reasons), she uses them as a center from which she sallies into Salvadoran history and culture, and Bondanza family lore. She has spent years absorbing the elliptical narratives that bob up in family conversation. Her husband mentions tidbits of history yet resists her when she presses for more details. Fortunately his Aunt Adela is a more forthcoming and patient informant, answering questions by e-mail.
And Kephart has digested a vast array of scholarship (a bibliography is included), as well as ephemera as unlikely as a 1939 pamphlet promoting Salvadoran coffee. Additionally, photographs, most of them hers, provide ambience with their straightforward, unintrusive glimpses of the places and people who make up her subject.
The motif that serves as binding thread is her desire to give back to her husband’s family their own story, to make persuasive her passion for their legacy. Embedded in that desire are her assumptions that a “collected” story is worth more; that the tellers of a fragmented oral history will be impressed by an outsider’s interest; that a shaped story has the power to ameliorate the strangeness between teller and hearer.
There is no evidence in the memoir that these things are true. Bill’s mother and aunt seem to be proud of the fact that Kephart is a published writer, but they don’t seem to care one way or the other about this particular work. What they really like is to see her understand a few words of Spanish.
Bill’s grandfather does make a good story. In 1940, after nearly losing his life to politics, he is saved by a change of dictators and goes to work for a bank. He buys a large cattle pasture high in the hills, and from that modest beginning he builds St. Anthony’s Farm, eventually adding other farms.
Coffee was introduced to El Salvador by a Brazilian teacher in 1839. By the 1920s it was entrenched as the major export. Kephart makes the case that it is a better crop than those that preceded it, depending on and feeding the soil, jungle, insects and animals. Much is made of Bondanza’s kindness to the peasants who “come with the land,” a generosity that Bill’s mother continues. After an earthquake, her first concern is to rebuild their homes.
Readers may find themselves reconsidering their prejudices about the haves and have-nots of this poor country. In describing the export economy of the nation, back through crops of cocoa and indigo, Kephart makes clear the ways that peasants have been exploited, and she contrasts that to Bondanza’s husbandry of the land and collaboration with its tenants.
Kephart’s memoir is loosely structured, a web of told stories, visits to the farm, research, conversations with her husband and her own imaginative reflections. She conveys “[t]he beauty, the danger, the impetuosity of the land.” She is most effective in describing rural El Salvador and the people of St. Anthony’s Farm: Her prose is lyrical, lush, detailed, evocative. She’s generous and gently humorous. She introduces the family story lines by cutting into dialogue, though she makes deft transitions out of these stiff openings.
What feels forced, oddly enough, is her own presence in the narrative, the times when she is in El Salvador, indeed, the times when she is in Philadelphia, trying to probe her husband’s feelings about his history. He comes across as cool, withholding, despite her praise of his kind nature, and although she mentions that he shows no interest in her history (she calls herself “the child of privilege”), she tiptoes around the implications.
For Kephart, Spanish is a run-on sentence. There’s something touching about her impatience with the stubborn peskiness of her husband’s language. It’s a change from her self-criticism. Still, she doesn’t reflect much on the ways this may be at the heart of her distance from her husband’s life. She says Bill isn’t “home” unless he’s in El Salvador, and so, she writes, “I want my husband to look back and keep looking until he finds me inside the things he loves, the country that shaped him, the memories that keep him whole.”
Yet rather than moving in the memoir from geography and history into the marital relationship she says is its reason for being, she avoids summing up or deepening her discussion, distracted at the end by the horrible earthquakes of early 2001. She doesn’t broach the obvious question: If her husband’s land cannot be salvaged, where does that leave her?
