Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

Aristotle and Dante and the Waters of the World

Oh boy.

I’ve made some edits to this review because I feel like I didn’t do it justice, but also because it’s a story that I keep coming back to mentally. I tend to get hooked by certain lines and passages in things, and I cannot underscore enough how beautifully written this book is.

As I have come to expect of Benjamin Alire Sáenz, it is beautifully written. His dialogue is almost foreign to me in how tender it is. His characters have a way of showing emotion so strongly through their prose that you almost forget that they struggle to communicate effectively with one another. It seems frustrating that Ari, who writes in his diary or pushes to understand others so empathetically and offer forgiveness and understanding, is someone who in his world is accused of being a delinquent. He is a fighter, that’s there, but that’s so tertiary to who he is and that is such a remnant of who he thought he had to be.

It says something so devastating about the treatment of Hispanic men and Hispanic people that this vibrant inner world means nothing on a surface level, unless Ari pushes against type and opens himself to others. And even then, there are racist characters, homophobic characters, who no matter the effort Ari makes or who he is, who the reader knows him to be, it doesn’t matter. This could easily be a story of discouragement that focuses on those interactions.

Ari’s efforts to meet his brother, to repair a meaningful relationship with his father, to confront his ideas of manhood and masculinity, is full of setbacks and tragedy and I found myself drawn to those storylines the most strongly. Yet, this is still a love story. This is the perspective of a boy in high school, who despite these very adult confrontations of masculinity and familial pain, is also navigating his first relationship.

I was a little dissatisfied with the ending. It seemed too romantic to me, less grounded in reality like much of the book is. Ari engages in this gesture to show his love for Dante, but I didn’t know that Dante had earned it. I had reservations about his behavior toward Ari, rooted in not having that same insight into his inner world as the reader has to Ari’s. Ari, however, is able to see through that. By the nature of his own experience and treatment, knowing who he is versus knowing who he is to other people, Ari continues to take the risk of reaching out.

How often does a queer story get to end romantically? How many examples are there, really, of a big, showy, romantic gesture in queer media? I think we worry that it’s cringe. That it’s too loud, that people will see us. The fact I was deeply invested in Ari’s relationship with his father and masculinity, with his brother and letting go, knowing when to let go of toxicity, more than I was Ari’s relationship with Dante, says something about me and the age that I am at—-it doesn’t say anything about the necessity of stories like this. How often are Hispanic men allowed a romantic ending with another man? I cannot imagine the pressure of writing this book.