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"Lionel Garcia was once my student, and of course, it is difficult
to think of anyone you knew 'back when' as a great writer. But as I read
his work I keep thinking of great writers. I remember especially that
in the novels
of Thomas Hardy and William Faulkner, the land that bred them is larger,
more important, and more memorable than any of its characters. Lionel
Garcia came from a place so remote in the wastelands of south Texas that
its people were hardly affected by the independence of Texas from Mexico.
The real original land will soon disappear as, like everything else, it
becomes part of the web of modern electronic communication, but the harsh,
ascetic land and its culture will survive as the unique place and human
condition of Garcia's fiction. As I read him, I also think repeatedly
of great writers who were both profoundly serious and profoundly comic--Chaucer
and Dickens. As in Dickens there are the exaggerations of character that
you may see at first as absurd but later, with astonishment, as radically
realistic. There is also the quieter and more continuous humor which seems
to invest every character, an amused but compassionate awareness of the
touch of absurdity in the make up of most human beings. As in Chaucer,
the ridiculous never inhibits a probing power of sympathy. Like both Chaucer
and Dickens, Garcia has an affinity for children and writes about them
with special affection and understanding. As in Dickens, the authorial
point of view is often that of a child.
"There are other kinds of evocations of greatness. Lionel's genius
is comic; it is also mythic...There is another mythic motif, vivid and
strange, that transcends story and theme and is more inherently mythic
than any theme could be. This occurs in what one might call moments of
spatiality, moments which remind us that San Diego, remote amidst desolation,
exists outside of time, outside of history...
"One of the remarkable aspects of Garcia's work is his success in
placing side by side mythic motifs and straight forward, realistic narrative
of contemporary life...Garcia is an ethnic writer, but an ethnic writer
to whom everyone is indebted."
Sam Southwell, Ph.D., Former Chair and Professor Emeritus of English,
University of Houston."America's Review", vol. 22, Fall-Winter,
No. 3-4,1994.