Infinite Country

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-9

Chapters 10-14

Chapters 15-18

Chapters 19-23

Chapters 24-30

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

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Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary

The chapter begins with a description of the girls’ reformatory where Talia is serving a six-month sentence. Though it is a state institution, it is run by nuns who still enforce the rules of their religious order on the girls. Talia has had a phone call with her father, Mauro, who has explained to her that everything he has tried to get her released from the institution has failed. Because her mother is expecting her to fly to the United States, she realizes she must break out of the reformatory and make her way back to Bogotá, where her father lives.

With the help of one of the other girls in her dormitory, she devises a plan to tie up Sister Susana at night, steal her keys, and escape. The effort goes flawlessly, and a dozen girls from the dormitory make it out into the darkness and woods. Talia goes a different way than the other girls. The narrator describes her escape by saying, “if you’d passed her in a car as she walked, small in her baggy captivity uniform, an expression more lost than determined, you might not have thought her a fugitive from the school for bad girls up the mountain, the place said to reform criminals in the making” (4).

At a gas station, she encounters an older man in a truck who is headed south in the morning. They sleep in the truck. The following day, they head south. The old man tries to converse with Talia and find out what she has done, though she does not tell him she has been a prisoner, saying rather that she is traveling to see her dying grandmother, who is actually already deceased.

In the next section, the narrator describes Talia’s crime. Waiting for a friend behind a restaurant, Talia watches as a man scalds a kitten to death with hot oil. She goes into the kitchen, takes a pot of boiling oil, and pours it over the man, Horatio. She is arrested and detained. She refuses to tell them what she has done until they brutalize her. After a brief period of having been released to her father, Talia is picked up by the police and taken to the reformatory.

Chapter 2 Summary

This brief chapter contains a meditation on the concept of “home,” saying, “When she was small Talia often asked her father the meaning of the word. Home” (11-12). The chapter also alludes to Mauro’s intense self-condemnation and remorse for convincing Elena to leave Colombia in the first place, noting: “People say drugs and alcohol are the greatest and most persuasive narcotics—the elements most likely to ruin a life. They’re wrong. It’s love” (13). It was out of love for Mauro that Elena gave up her stable life and became an illegal alien in the United States.

Chapter 3 Summary

The narrator relates the childhood stories of Elena and Mauro, also describing how they met, courted, and married. The background setting is the Colombia of the long civil war, with bombings, guerilla warfare, disappearing civilians, and murdered officials.

Mauro is an only child whose mother was abandoned by his father. When he is 10, she forces him out of the house, sending him to stay with Tiberio, his aunt’s boyfriend, with whom he makes a living by digging graves. Tiberio is well-acquainted with the ancient Andean creation myths and shares them with Mauro. At 14, permanently banished from his mother’s home, Mauro makes his way to El Centro in Bogotá, where he is unofficially adopted by a mugger named Jairo.

He finally finds a subsistence job at a market, where he encounters Elena and is entranced by her uniqueness and beauty. She is 14, and he is 15. Elena and her single mother, Perla, live above a lavandería, a laundry, that Perla owns. He only sees her weekly when she comes to the market. Gradually their acquaintance deepens. Mauro recognizes that she is of a different class, plus she has a stable home. He tries to put on airs to impress her and tells her almost nothing about his background. Their first kiss is magical: “That afternoon, they sat on the edge of her roof taking in the coppery spread of the capital and its darkening mountains. He kissed her, her lips soft as petals. Held her hand as night swallowed the firmament” (23).

Chapter 4 Summary

The narrator describes the budding romance between Elena and Mauro. The dutiful daughter becomes a clever sneak, finding ways and places to spend time with Mauro. Perla eventually allows Mauro to live with them above the laundry. While the narrator describes their relationship and the birth of their first child in 2000, there is no mention of them being married, which they apparently never are.

Colombia continued to suffer violence during that period, something that Perla and Mauro discuss: “‘This country doesn’t know it’s dying,’ Mauro said as they watched the news after dinner. ‘It’s not the country we want, but it’s the country we deserve,’ Perla answered while Elena remained silent” (26). Mauro becomes convinced that he can find better work abroad. He proposes that he leave the country, work for a time, and return with money. To his surprise, Elena produces a cache of money she

Chapters 1-4 Analysis

Engel challenges her readers from the beginning of the text, even with the opening one-sentence paragraph: “It was her idea to tie up the nun” (1). The sentence is intended to seize the attention of her readers and draw them into the story. She perpetuates this intent through the first chapter as she depicts a virginal prison escapee, far from home and not sure where she is, with no money and no way to communicate, and completely vulnerable. Talia is lost in the dark wilderness, searching for her home. The reader learns in the second chapter that “home” is a concept Talia has been curious about since childhood and, in fact, her vision of home has shifted. First, she is comfortable at home with Perla, her grandmother. Then she tells her father that he is her perpetual home. As he watches her grow in maturity and curiosity, however, she thinks about the United States, where her mother proclaims she has a home. The chapter foreshadows the ironic journey of the entire family as they end up spending two decades looking for a home.

Talia is something of a mysterious person in part because of her ruthlessness and cunning, since nothing in her upbringing pushed her in the direction of violence or misbehavior. Indeed, Sister Susana points out to Talia that she is unlike the other girls in the reformatory, something Talia denies. Throughout the book, Talia herself struggles to understand her darkness. It appears that Talia’s crime is a statement that Engel wants her readers to wrestle with. In the final analysis, it seems to be an expression of anger and defiance in the face of all the violence, suffering, and injustice perpetrated against her family.

In her writing, Engel switches tenses, occasionally breaking into the present tense when describing Elena’s current job and living situation, as if she is gossiping, telling part of a story with updates about the moment and then switching back into story mode. Engel also plays with the chronology of the story, retelling some aspects that happened long before the current time. For instance, after relating that Mauro accumulates 10 years of sobriety, in a later chapter the narrator takes the reader back through Mauro’s struggles with alcohol.

Engel also switches narrators. For most of the book, an omniscient narrator recounts things about Mauro that he never confides to Elena. Two-thirds of the way through, Engel writes chapters in the first person as Karina and as Nando. When writing as Karina, Engel confides that Karina is really the author of the book, and even though Karina is only 18 as the story is told, she gives her the final chapter with its expression of profound wisdom at the end. Finally, Engel inserts Spanish words and phrases—without putting them in italics—and Colombian concepts into the narrative, challenging the English-speaking reader to discover aspects of Colombian culture and the Spanish language that are essential to the story.