Tag: catalina

Catalina is a novel about an Ecuadorian student caught between the Harvard lifestyle and her and her grandparents’ undocumented status in the USA. Catalina is a witty English major starting her final year at Harvard, where she has a thing with the son of a famous filmmaker and gets invited to be part of a secret society. Back home in New York City are her grandparents who raised her in the US, but the two sides to Catalina’s life come together as undocumented immigrants become the focus of political battles.

This is a self-conscious campus novel, unpacking the often trivial concerns of campus novel characters through a messy protagonist who stresses about her thesis but also her and her grandparents’ ability to stay in the US. Catalina says that she was born in South America and now lives and studies in North America so how can she not call herself American, and that makes this book feel very “American”, as in it explores the complexity of the connection across these countries and in different spaces in the USA. There’s a lot of discussion of US literature and thinkers, as you’d expect in a campus novel, and also how Catalina does and doesn’t interact with South American history and thought, both through her grandfather and through Harvard. In this way, the book explores knowledge and the different ways people come by it. At the same time, it is an emotional novel, with a spiralling protagonist who rejects help from people when she needs it.

I’ve seen this book miscategorised as ‘dark academia’ and that isn’t going to do it any favours: it is a modern successor to the American literary campus novel, questioning what gets to be part of a campus novel and who is excluded, but it is certainly not going to fulfil anyone’s desire for dark academia. It is witty and sad, not really focused on a particular plot but more on Catalina’s character and her experiences across a number of months.