Goodbye Miramar

Book excerpt: The book starts in the neighborhood of Miramar in San Juan, Puerto Rico towards the end of the 1960s It begins in midst of a relationship between two college students. The woman is Susan Ruiz, the daughter of a well known artist of the time, who is seeped in European culture: and her male counterpart is Hector Ramon Martinez, the son of a renown medical doctor who lives in Ocean Park, a neighborhood of established professionals. The novel takes place in the middle of the intellectual, political, and drug culture of the time. Hector Ramon Martinez, who aspires to be a writer, but who suffers a severe mental breakdown, is sent to Spain where he is hospitalized in the Esquerdo Sanatorium before he drifts through different cities in an attempt to find himself, in a valid reason for his life. The two of them will meet again in New York University in Manhattan where even though they are in the process of drafting their doctoral dissertations, they walk and talk the streets of the Big Apple without a clear idea of what they can become. The result for him, at any rate, is this convoluted text.