Ciao! Miami - A Review

Author: Fawzy Zablah
Publisher: Little Havana Press/Lulu.com
ISBN: 978-1-8472-8732-8
Pages: 98

Ciao! Miami is many things, but what it is not is a winning collection of short stories. The author attempts to draw his characters from life, particularly, life in the seedy sections of Miami, Florida. By the author’s own account, the book is “[a]n uncompromising look at lower class Miami in the late 90s,” and in this he or she succeeds, as all Fawzy Zablah affords us is “a look,” and nothing more. We are presented with mere situations, where characters engage each other in everyday dialogue—and we’re talking drug addicts, dealers, whores, gang bangers, transsexuals, you name it—but these situations are not full-blown stories, which would involve some measure of plotting.

After completing some of the stories, I came away empty, having gained nothing by reading them, as a few are absolutely vapid. The characters are true to life perhaps, in the sense that they are not fluffed to fit a literary paradigm, but they are also inevitably one-dimensional, and they experience no real arcs. Though the type of characters featured in this book haven’t seen much light of day in the larger literary world, Fawzy Zablah could have presented us with more in the way of story; more layers, more dimensions, just . . . more!

There is a story in the book that is a wonderful case in point. It is called Juanito Valenzuela’s Crack Rocks, and it is all of four pages long. The story recounts the first-time experience of a young man experimenting with crack. It starts out with him and a crack whore sitting on a blue couch in a studio in Coral Gables, and the two are gabbing about crack and other mundane issues, and meanwhile, expletives are flying around like so many cave-roosting bats. Eventually, more friends show up, and the five of them sit in a circle while passing around a crack pipe. When the pipe gets to the first-timer, he is instructed on how to smoke it—like “a regular bong” in this case. Three hours into the crackfest, the group is out of it, all of them laid out on the floor with music blaring in the background, “loud and incoherent” we are told. A little gibberish ensues before a character launches into a discussion on another mutual acquaintance, Juanito Valenzuela, of the story’s title. We are told about the beating he received from a few cops, and a rumor that suggests he lost an eye in the ordeal. But before all is said and done, quite frankly, nothing of any relevance is really said or done. And that is the problem with a lot of these stories.

Beyond this, there are a few issues with the typesetting, and one issue with the misuse of a certain punctuation mark. On page 5 of the book, a character says: “It’s too; I don’t know. It’s just a little too much for tonight.” The break in speech in the first sentence is punctuated by a semi-colon. In lieu of this, the sentence should have been broken by ellipsis points, like this: “It’s too . . . I don’t know.” I’m glad this opportunity presented itself here, because I’ve been meaning to address this issue ever since I read and reviewed James Somers’s The Chronicles of Soone: Heir to the King. Semicolons should never be used in dialogue, unless the person the dialogue is streaming from is a university professor, or a scholar. In other words, unless your character speaks like a scholarly journal article, or other formal piece, you can punctuate dialogue with less formal punctuation marks. In fact, this is strongly advised.

Other common errors come in the form of the following, which need no commentary: