STARS IN HIS EYES, midcentury tale of Catalan man's escape from Franco's Spain to Hollywood's glamour days

STARS IN HIS EYES
MARTÍ GIRONELL (tr. Adrian Nathan West)
AmazonCrossing
99¢ Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: From the fascist Franco regime to Hollywood’s glamour—an epic historical novel based on the meteoric rise of one of the world’s most celebrated restaurateurs.

Ceferino Carrión is desperate for a new life—one of opportunity, fortune, and fame. But he knows he’ll never find this life in war-torn Spain. With his home country under the heel of the devastating Franco dictatorship and call-up papers on his doorstep, Cefe knows there’s only one thing he can do: run.
A new life awaits in America, as does a new name—Jean Leon. From the concrete valleys of the Bronx to the sun-soaked hills of California, Jean crosses paths with legendary superstars, political powerhouses, and dangerous mobsters as he flees his past and pursues his dreams. With friends like Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean to see him through, Jean soon gets his own taste of stardom, opening his glamourous Beverly Hills restaurant, La Scala, to nightly swarms of celebrities.

But with every new adrenaline rush of celebrity, Jean is further distanced from everyone he loves. Only in searching through his ever-receding past in Barcelona can he find the key to unlock the dream life he has risked so much to build.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM PRIME'S MONTHLY FIRST READS PROGRAM AT AMAZON. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'll just start this review with the statement that dropping the w-bomb this often is a crime against literature.

Three names, Cefe (birth name), Justo (assumed name in New York, where US ally Franco's spies find him), Jean Leon (final alias in Hollywood, which more or less holds), are needed to get our main character from dodging the draft in Phalangist Spain to his glittering restauranteurship in Hollywood. A man of parts, then, a man whose life is going to be exciting, right?

Wellll...not *exactly* the case. Not the fault of the story, but the storyteller and/or translator.

I most often spend a good deal of a review quoting from the author's writing. In reviewing translations, that's often a cheat as I see it; how would I know what the author's writing is like, I'm reading someone's interpretation of it. But this story's writing is not particularly exciting to me. The story is an important one, and won a Catalan literary prize in 2018. Immigrants who come to the US to start anew, whether for personal reasons or governmental ones, and who change their identities in the process, are important members of the American body politic.

The current administration sworn in this week agrees with me, and has reinstated many important channels by which those born elsewhere can fully join in US society. In our PoV character's case, things were...grey...in theory, our government supported the one he fled from serving with his life. Their spies did find draft dodgers here and repatriate them. However, there was not any sense by the US Government of necessary aid for the seekers and no sense at all of need to assist or hinder the sought. So Jean Leon (let's go with that one, the last one) exists in a legal precarity, but makes his way into circles of social power by his mastery of food.

His Hollywood life was a glamourous one, rubbing elbows with stars made (eg Sinatra) and in the making (eg James Dean). He's a fixer of problems, as most restauranteurs are, giving alibis and setting scenes for public consumption. He does the usual things, like marrying and having children; but remember that Catalan family he came from? He left them. Anything that happened to the last one will happen to the next. And it does.

As characters go, Jean Leon does not draw one's admiration. He's completely self-centered and very selfish. But he's like many men of his generation in that he worked as hard as he possibly could at a career that stole him from any possibility of connection with his families. His role was being a provider; what was wrong with that idea was that it didn't take into account what the family's other members might want. His wife would've preferred that he be there for the kids and for her in the crises that family life inevitably contains...and he never is.

The basic issue for me was the characters at the heart of the tale being pale. They were watercolors set into an oil painting as a background. Jean Leon is always in motion, always doing, acting, making. And that doesn't make him interesting to follow, just so speedily retreating that we're either going to give up chasing him or run after him at top speed and not get any sense of connection with him or those around him.

In a lot of ways, though, that was the point. Men at that time, in his station of life, weren't available for serious relationships. Famous people are, inevitably, users of those around them. Marriages aren't always the best breeding ground for a clear and satisfying view of the other's authentic self...the Intimate Enemy issue is not a psychologist's jargonistic exaggeration. So there's no reason to *fault* Author Gironell or Translator West...just to say that this isn't a relationship I myownself enjoyed having with the people in this story.

Structurally, the management of time's passing was ineffective in creating tension or narrative momentum. In the middle of a chapter, almost two years pass with a new paragraph headed, "Just over a year and a half later..."! No no no! This is sloppy editing and lazy writing. It isn't the only example I could cite, but it's the one that got up my nose the worst.

I read it but I didn't get it. As a cautionary tale of the Price of Ambition and the Cruelty of Fame, yeah okay. But as a chronicle of an interesting man's journey to...what? he doesn't change, really...somewhere inside himself, it's wanting.

The best reader for this book is a Fifties Hollywood buff.