Palm Latitudes

I read Palm Latitudes while being snowed in during a freak blizzard, without power, heat or lights. I read most of the book out loud, the brillance of the language, the power of the word and a solitary candle kept me warm. It was as if I entered those Palm Latitudes during that snowstorm and those characters were with me. Braverman, a Jewish woman, got a lot of flack for using three Latina voices for her characters. What her critics failed to recognized was she was creating a mythology, both feminine and tropical and it had nothing to do with the old white ways. One of the characters in the novel comes to the realization, "We don't live in an age of anxiety. We live in an age of terror." I think this novel was ahead of it's time (written in the early 80's and not published until '89) with it's inclusion of AIDS, and the only redeemable males in the novel are homosexual, perhaps most people are not ready to enter these Latitudes. But if you deny yourself access, you'll be denying yourself the magic that the written page was meant to offer.

Kate Braverman sees connections and shows them to us -- "She can outwait them. Any woman could. Women have waited millions of years, growing seperate as another species, with visions and priorities no man-words, no man-measurements can comprehend." -- like this one. A LUSH story.

I first came across Ms. Braverman through a serendipitous reading of her Squandering the Blue. Palm Latitudes is an extraordinary work which traces the rooted infrastructure of three women's lives, each one a hybrid creation of the industrial village of Los Angeles, each one a cantadora of resonant flesh and spirit. To read Braverman's poetic masterpiece is to experience literary alchemy. I keep the novel at my bedside, as I have done for the past five years, and am repeatedly renewed by its presence. This is an masterful author to cherish; this is a work to sustain you through life's many quickenings and passages.

Kate Braverman is a writer who has been praised highly by important writers like John Rechy and Joan Didion. In this novel, Braverman continues to assert her unique view of modern life, especially in Los Angeles, which becomes a metaphor for greater latitudes. Her prose is rich and evocative, haunting at times. That this novel and others of her writings are out of print testifies to the indifference of publishers today to fulfilling their function to perpetuate fine writing.

It is indeed a shame that Kate Braverman's novels remain out of print. In Palm Latitudes, Braverman weaves a tale pregnant with imagery and humanity. It is the story of several women who are at similar precipices in their life; and in Braverman's world of Los Angeles, it is the women who are simultaneously enlightened by the textures of existence and caged by their men and their sex. A powerful novel with an equally engaging sense of feminism, Palm Latitudes examines men, women and culture with a startlingly microscopic and perceptive lens.