“Nowadays people think historians are stuffy types, but history is a kind of magic I doing here.”

So says Anette, the most compelling of the characters populating “Land of Love and Drowning” by Virgin Islands native Tiphanie Yanique. A multigenerational novel set in Yanique’s native land, “Love and Drowning” opens just before the U.S. arrives, after purchasing several of the islands from Denmark in 1917. It concludes in the 1970s.

The coming of the Americans ― and the ensuing arrival of the tourists ― will change everything. The newcomers snap up prime real estate and privatize beaches, increasingly isolating themselves from the native population ― except when they want a dose of local color as a backdrop. Meanwhile, islanders are shipped off to war, experiencing Jim Crow first hand in Louisiana ― decades before their kids watch Birmingham and Selma on television.

But while Yanique’s novel keeps half an eye on these troublesome outsiders, its focus and energies are found elsewhere, as multiple narrators spin alternative histories rather than blandly accepting those being imposed. “Nothing ever happen just so,” Anette tells us. “It must be story.” One may not be able to escape the past. But one can learn to read and tell it slant.

Which, as with that great Caribbean writer from Colombia, often means telling it through myth.

There are many parallels between Yanique’s novel and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Their magical realism. Their often radical temporal shifts within a seemingly straightforward narrative (Yanique continually foreshadows what’s to come). Their symbolic use of color (especially blue and red, here). Their markedly similar openings. Their devastating hurricanes.

Thematically, both novels are consumed by nostalgia for a rural, precolonial past and simultaneously wary of the dangers of solitude, in which one’s isolation from the world ― imposed, chosen or both ― turns incestuously inward.

There is incest aplenty in this novel, beginning with the unholy love between the ethereally beautiful Eeona and her father, a ship captain who seemingly has it all ― until he drowns in fleeing his passion for his daughter, who will raise younger sister Anette.

A cross between Amaranta and Remedios the Beauty in “Solitude,” Eeona is trapped by memories of her family’s former prestige ― and by a beauty which allows her to ignore how far that family has fallen.

Like so many characters in “Solitude,” Eeona is fatalistically obsessed with a past that she is therefore condemned to repeat. As is often true in magical realism ― which tends to privilege fate while downplaying character ― she’s also therefore less nuanced or interesting. Eeona has no substance. And because she’s as light as a feather, she’s arbitrarily blown hither and yon.

Anette is another matter. “I had just want to be really alive for as long as possible. That my goal. To live,” Anette tells us in her Virgin Islands Creole, which lends her sections of the narrative an earthy vitality.

And live she does, grounding the unfocused hungers and dreams of more self-involved and less textured characters ― including her parents, her sister and her daughters ― in something real and alive.

She falls in love. Bears three children, each with a different father. Leads a protest movement to take back privatized beaches. And learns, as other characters do not, how to negotiate the gap between what she wants and what she needs, while still being true to herself.

This novel could do with more of such truthiness. Portions of it are gorgeously written, but as with Eeona herself, that beauty stales because it’s not tethered. As a result, too much of what bids to be magical comes out as whimsical: If the pieces on the board can be rearranged at will, none of them ultimately matter.

Anette’s own revisionism is more satisfying because her stories engage the past rather than escaping it ― loving the land rather than drowning offshore.

By Mike Fischer

(Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

(MCT Information Services)