Gringa in a Strange Land

Linda Dahl
Robert R. Reed (2010)
ISBN 9781934759394
Reviewed by Tyler R. Tichelaar for Reader Views (7/09)


Linda Dahl has recaptured a time and place she knew as a young woman. Her own travel to Mexico in the 1970s inspired her to create her young American artist, Erica Mason, who travels to Mexico to work on her art and to “find herself” in the process.

“Gringa in a Strange Land” is an episodic novel about a year in the life of Erica as she struggles to become an accomplished artist, living on her own, having various relationships with men, and trying to overcome her prescription drug addiction, particularly to Quaaludes. Erica meets several colorful people, including a doctor hooked on drugs who prescribes them for her, obnoxious, violent, or married men with whom she regrets having a relationship, immature housemates, lesbians who befriend her, and El Autor—a man who dreams of becoming a great author.

The novel focuses upon Erica and her friends, and more specifically her search to become an artist, learning to set her priorities, set aside her quest for a man in exchange for her self-respect, and overcome her drug addiction to focus on her art. She makes slow but steady progress in these goals throughout the novel. There is little plot or action—most of it being internalized in Erica as she undergoes change—but the book is realistic as a portrait of growth in one woman, traveling about Mexico, looking for subjects to paint, and ultimately looking for her own sense of self-worth.

Linda Dahl’s use of character and atmosphere are commendable for how they appear so simple, yet they enrich and perfectly blend together to create an intoxicating world. Dahl sprinkles Spanish phrases throughout the book, which add to the atmosphere without ever distracting the non-Spanish speaker from the book’s purpose or storyline, and Dahl is often at her best describing scenes of Mexico through Erica’s senses as in the following passage:

"Erica sometimes spent hours watching the Mayans and the mestizos and the ‘pure’ Spanish and the pale tourists. She told herself it was all good material and it was: arms open, the Yucatecans fielded the slightest puffs of breeze with expertly-wielded fans and languid arabesques of hand movements. There was the sound of drawled Spanish and hushed Mayan, which Erica could never decode. Strips of tires lashed to their tree-hard feet, there were always campesinos, skilled like Africans to bear perpetual burdens of babies and baskets of produce, men and sometimes women carrying capacious bags full of limes."

When Erica was high, the soft, somewhat peevish Mayan voices sounded more like the twitter of tropical birds and she would close her eyes and could imagine she was a part of this stream of life.

One might well call this book “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.” It is less pretentious than James Joyce’s classic novel, yet uses multiple languages and explores the character in a bildungsroman manner. And Erica is more human, far easier to empathize with, and easily more likeable than Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus.

Ultimately, Linda Dahl has captured a time and place, making them come alive again with an effective atmosphere, believable yet eccentric characters, and an internal confusion that becomes an awakening for the main character. Just as a good painting can make a person feel he has stood in a foreign place, Linda Dahl allows the reader to escape through her seemingly effortless and graceful style. In this case, I find it hard to imagine a painting would be worth as many words as “Gringa in a Strange Land” when finishing the novel is like awakening from a dream of Mexico that felt so vividly real.

Make comment on weblog

FTC Disclosure