“The Last War” is an exquisitely crafted work built around intimacy and the fragility of relationships. The world of Ana Menendez’s characters is foreign and torn by conflict. The political landscape is no more explosive than the emotional landscape of those who inhabit it.
The novel’s narrator meets the man who will become her husband at a stateside newspaper. They are an unlikely pair; she, a photographer, is the daughter of Cuban refugees. He is a reporter with Ivy League grace, cast as a golden boy.
Despite obvious differences, they marry, Brando Price Phillips and Margarita Anastasia Morales, more affectionately known as Wonderboy and Flash. And after their brief European honeymoon, it was “wars and more wars, mass graves, suicide bombings — our great conjugal tour of all that was wrong and broken in us. Wonderboy did all the work, made all the travel arrangements, secured the hotels and the translators, and I came along at the end of it, his shooter.”
Flash describes them as “the war junkies: Eros and Chaos, endlessly drawn to the ragged margins where other people hated and died. It was as if we believed constant movement would deliver us finally from the disappointments of an ordinary life. For years, it seemed true enough. He was a writer, I was a photographer, and from war to war, we made a team.”
They move to Istanbul a year after 9/11, figuring that war in Iraq was inevitable. Wonderboy enters Iraq in the spring of 2003, figuring it is only a matter of time and visas before his wife can join him. She remains in Istanbul, in a comfortable apartment, a little at loose ends.
One Friday afternoon, Flash opens a letter, typed on onionskin, that rocks her world. Buried in the text of what seems to be a gossipy but supportive letter from a friend is: “I wanted to get in touch, to find out how you are holding up under the strain. I feel so bad for you. I can’t believe your husband has done it again. Is doing it again. Why can’t the [a–hole] keep his pants zipped? (Sorry, but that’s how I feel. Sorry.) I met the young woman, Nadia or whatever her name is, pretty girl . . . I suppose you know all about it and don’t care a fig. Of all the things to build a marriage on, deception is probably as good as any.” The poisonous letter is postmarked Jordan, and signed Mira; Flash doesn’t know anyone named Mira.
The mystery of the writer’s identity hangs in the air. A woman, certainly.
“It had to be a woman, a woman full of unrealized desires and vague notions of romantic love. A man’s taste for pain runs to its blunter forms. Men are daylight sadists; women have spent too many generations laboring in silent anonymity and unspoken resentments. For their pleasure, they build trenches in the heart’s night.”
Flash is unmoored, unable to confront her husband and equally unable to find relief in her images or walk her way across Istanbul to the point of coming to terms with the dilemma. In her ramblings through the city, her path crosses that of a woman who, by her walk, is a Westerner, but she’s dressed in a black abaya. It turns out the two have crossed paths: The mysterious walker is Alexandra Truso, a sophisticated woman, a writer with a history of running from herself. And Alexandra is instrumental, as Flash struggles with the dilemma of trust and faithfulness, in shaping a whole new self.
Novelists and journalists each have a different eye for detail, and Menendez plants a foot firmly in each camp, to rich result. The journalist recounts the pull of war and, in flashback, earlier social experiences that define the marriage. The novelist explores the emotional landscape, what happens in a seasoned marriage when doubt wings in, unexpected, from the outside.
The result is a novel, lyrically written, that feels strikingly real and heartfelt, a narrative by a woman destroying herself with imagination and doubt.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer.
