Infinite Country

The sense of irony swells throughout the book. Elena mourns not being able to care for her own daughter while being the only one who can care for Lance. Lance is an autistic outcast who only finds comfort in Elena, someone else who doesn’t belong. Through the bulk of the narrative, neither Elena nor Mauro ends up in the country where they want to be. They are both unhappy and feel they have failed their families; in particular, they regret not being there to care for their loved ones. Caring for loved ones comes to be represented as the highest of virtues and the truly longed-for paradise. Ironically, however, Elena cannot care for her missing daughter or her dying mother, and Mauro cannot care for his wife.

Talia’s scorching of Horatio is also ironic: She perceives that she had no logical reason to pour boiling oil on this stranger, even as recompense for killing the innocent kitten. Her act, however, which makes no sense to her, is a sort of collective recompense for all the innocent characters in the story whose hopes have been destroyed by uncaring powers beyond their control.

While the book itself is not a mystery, it contains pervasive mysterious elements. For instance, throughout nearly the entire book, the reader is kept in suspense as to whether Talia will make it to the airport and get her ticket. Many of the story elements are dangling and answered only as the reader progresses through the narrative. For example, for most of the book, readers wonder how Talia ended up back in Colombia when her mother, brother, and sister are still in the United States. The back-and-forth nature of the storyline means readers know that Perla has died, but not when or why.

Another example of mystery is the motif of disappearance. People vanish out of the lives of others in this narrative. Sometimes they vanish into thin air, as with Mauro’s father, an act for which his mother never forgave him or Mauro. Sometimes life leads them away and they just never come back, as with Elena’s father. This could easily have been Mauro’s path had he not recovered from alcoholism. Often, there are simply sudden, tragic deaths, as with Ximena or with Jairo, the mugger who took in Mauro as a young boy.

The greatest mystery of all, by the author’s design, is whether the reunited family will stay in the United States or return to Colombia. Engel’s intention is for the reader to understand that this is an unknown all undocumented families face.